Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 28, 2011 - 10:30AM
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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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>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are now starting the session on emerging issues. I will hand it over to our chair. Lillian.
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Lillian Nalwoga. I work with a collaboration on international ICT policy in eastern southern Africa. We are resuming our meeting, and I would like to open this morning's session dealing with emerging issues.
Our question we are focusing on is governance different from the mobile Internet? No, sorry, it governance different for the mobile Internet from the wired Internet?
This question is of utmost importance to us in developing countries where the mobile Internet is connecting us as individuals and businesses to services, markets, and information, previously beyond our reach.
In East Africa we see a very clear example of this through mobile services, bringing sophisticated financial services into the hands of a high percentage of the population who previously had no such access. They were unbanked.
But the question is not just confined to the developing world. Everywhere the unpaid optic and the use of mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablet devices, is providing a different Internet experience from one we enjoy from wired laptops and desktops.
By wired, we mean essentially a device that is used in a fixed location, not on the move.
Well, in the session we have been asked to consider three main questions in this session. The first question is what are the key development issues given strong mobile penetration in developing countries and the use of new equipment, applications, that did not exist before?
Our second question to consider is how do Internet policy and regulation choices in the mobile Internet context impact the range of human rights, openness and neutral -- neutrality. Sorry.
The third question is what are the policy and governance choices and opportunities in the mobile Internet space that foster innovation, skills building, entrepreneurship, and maximizing the Internet for economic development?
While these are our core choices in which our moderators will lead us through our discussion, please do not feel limited to only these topics or issues. Let us all consider the innovative ecosystem that is growing up around that network of mobile applications, social networking and policy issues connected with this.
I would like to introduce the moderators for our session, Mr. Sebastian Bellagamba and Mr. Jeff Brueggeman. And our remote moderation -- remote moderator participation, Ms. Claudia Selli.
Let me pass it over to Jeff to introduce our panel, and we begin.
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you very much, Chair.
As you said, this session will focus on the mobile Internet, and this is the first time that the emerging session has done so, which is in some ways mobile has been a constant theme of the IGF. So I think it's both very fitting that we would be focusing on that issue, and as you noted, particularly fitting given that we are in Kenya. We already heard yesterday in the developing issues session about the M-Pesa and the innovative uses of mobile that are happening here in Kenya and in Africa.
Today's session is going to focus on a technology perspective on the mobile Internet, and it really provides an interesting focus on those issues as they affect development and as they affect the other issues we talk about at the IGF. And we have a very esteemed set of panelists here to present their views and lead the discussion.
Sebastian is going to introduce the panelists and they are going to give some opening remarks providing a view of what's happening with technology on the mobile Internet. We are then going to open it up to questions and take both remotely and in the audience, and we want this to be a very interactive session. You know, we have our subquestions that should guide our discussion, but we are not limited, as the Chair said.
And then finally, we are going to stop the discussion at about 12:00 to leave about 30 minutes for the concluding remarks. So we'll let the discussion run until that point.
I thought it might be helpful to present a few data points about the mobile Internet as background for discussion. Of course I have got them on my tablet device here.
Back in July 2010, Ericsson estimated that mobile phone subscriptions had reached 5 billion worldwide. This year they are estimating mobile broadband subscriptions will reach 1 billion by the end of the year. So already we see that about half of all Internet users and one-seventh of the world's population are moving to mobile. And as we know this trend going to continue rapidly over the next few years.
A recent Cisco report predicts that over the next few years global mobile data traffic will outpace wire line traffic by three times, and by 2015 the traffic from wireless devices will exceed traffic from wired devices. So the mobile Internet is really the future of the Internet.
Also by 2015, Ericsson estimates that mobile broadband subscriptions will hit 3.8 billion or about half of the world's population. So truly staggering growth and reach of mobile Internet.
And I think one interesting point that really drives home the power of the mobile Internet is another Cisco statistic that showed there are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they don't have electricity at their home. So the mobile Internet is actually outpacing the electrical grid, which is, as I said, really puts the scope and power of the mobile Internet into perspective.
So with that, I am going to turn it over to Sebastian.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you, Jeff. I already have many questions in my mind just with the data that you presented.
Let me introduce you to the panelists for today. We have an excellent panel.
We have, from my left, Mr. Ravi Shanker, Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India.
Next is Mr. Hossein Moiin, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia Siemens Network. After him, we have Mr. Burt Kaliski, Chief Technology Officer, VeriSign. And we have Steve Young just to the left of the Secretariat. Steve Song; sorry. Sorry to change your last name. Steve Song, who the founder of the Village Telco. And on the end of the left we have Ms. Jacquelynn Ruff, Vice President, International Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs for Verizon.
Moving forward, I will ask an initial question to all the panelists to address and set the stage for this panel. And I will ask you what's your initial observations on the current and future mobile Internet landscape.
I will start with Steve Song, please.
>>STEVE SONG: Good morning. From a governance perspective, when talking about the mobile Internet, it seems to me it divides up into two clear issues. One is getting connected and the other is protecting people once they are connected.
And I choose to focus my remarks on the former this morning, although obviously both are incredibly important.
If there's one word I would like you to take away from this session, at least from me, that word would be failure, and the implications of failure. And I want to talk about that briefly at two levels. Failure at the macro level and at the micro level.
So if we have learned anything from the last few years, it's that systems that fail badly can have catastrophic global, far-reaching implications. So systems that don't fail well, like banking systems or nuclear reactors, we can no longer afford for them to fail because the consequences of failure are unaffordable. And I think we need to look at that idea of designing systems that fail well as opposed to designing systems with no expectation of failure in terms of the mobile industry and look at one particular bottleneck in terms of one particular fragile area of the mobile Internet industry, and that is spectrum and spectrum management. And that doesn't really get into -- it hasn't found its way very much into the sort of Internet governance debate, but I think it's overdo now as an issue for discussion.
So the problem is that wireless spectrum determines the nature of mobile access. It has done this by, for instance, limiting the number of market players and, by consequence, limiting competition and keeping prices high.
It also can limit technological choices in terms of access. So I think going forward we want to look at spectrum management policy from the point of view of how do we get systems that don't fail badly. When we give out spectrum to someone, if there are suboptimal outcomes, how do we recover from that? Because our experience historically in spectrum management has been that it can take a generation or sometimes two generations to correct bad spectrum decisions.
And it's also an issue of fragility in terms of industries. If you are an investor, you don't place all of your money on a single stock or a single sort of class of stocks. You want diversity for a healthy portfolio. Similarly in terms of the technology of access. We want diversity. We don't just want mobile. We want to think about Wi-Fi and other emerging opportunities, such as television wide spaces spectrum, and if we don't start thinking about access as an ecology of access as opposed to talking about a single industry, I think we are creating what amounts to a fragile system.
Now, the other element of failure I want to talk about is more fun and interesting in a way. It's failure at the micro level. And I want to quote Kurtis Carlson who said, "In a world where so many people have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom-up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top-down tends to be orderly but dumb." And I think that's the opportunity we have on this continent is to unleash that innovation through access. But the barrier to that happening, the barrier is not the physical access. It's affordability. Because I will quote someone else here, Clay Shirky, who emphasized the importance of lowering the cost of failure, because when failure is expensive, the lesson learned is to stop wasting money. But if we can lower the cost of access sufficiently so that we can fail instructively, we can unleash the kind of innovation that Curtis Carlson is talking about.
So when we talk about governance issues around access, it's not just the physical access. Affordability, especially when you look at the cost of access on this continent compared to income levels, it is a huge issue in terms of how we can unleash innovation.
I think that's all I need to say initially.
Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much.
I will now -- We have another panelist which is online. I just confirmed Vagner Diniz is online. So Vagner Diniz is the manager for the W3C office in Brussels.
So, please, Hossein, would you please give us your initial thoughts.
>>HOSSEIN MOIIN : Thank you very much. Good morning to you all. It's my pleasure to be here and what I would like to talk to you about perhaps dovetails nicely into what Steve was talking about in spectrum. But before I do that, let me just briefly tell you a few facts about mobile industry.
Mobile industry, as a whole, is the fastest-growing industry in the history of mankind. Today, we heard earlier, it reaches over five and a half billion people.
There is no other technology in our history that has reached as many people and has been as widespread. I would say that has been a re sounding success, and the market bears to that fact.
Now, what do we need in order to improve on such a hugely successful ecosystem?
I believe the key requirements, as mentioned earlier, include spectrum, include better, faster, more intelligent networks. And last but not least, better touch points. These are the devices and applications that we see. These can be tailored to specific condition. In a country that has no banking system, mobile industry has been used to overcome that shortage. This is a phenomenal accomplishment. Who would have thought that when we started this industry more than two decades ago?
Now, this obviously has a lot of policy implications. It requires a healthy competitive environment, but it also requires perhaps a leveling of the playing field. And I think here Steve's point is very salient. We do need active management of spectrum. We do need to move ahead with the technology and realize that we have far better receivers and transmitters today than when Marconi first invented radio. There has been leaps and bounds of improvement made by technologies over the last hundred years, and this needs to be captured in law.
Last but not least, I think affordability, as Steve pointed out, is a huge issue and it's one that wireless can help to resolve. But let's also not kid ourselves. But let's also not kid ourselves. In order for someone to invest in affordable access, there must be a business case for it. And here is where governments can play a constructive role. We can form public-private partnerships where access is deemed uneconomical in order to provide that. We can improve on technology, innovating technology to make sure that we use the most energy efficient and using energy that's locally sourced in order to overcome some of these challenges.
But all in all, it must be a healthy environment for the investors in order to invest in access so that innovations locally can be brought and their new services can be used.
This virtuous cycle of investment, innovation, and adoption of service is one that I hope will continue for many years.
Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. It's now Burt's turn. Thank you.
>>BURT KALISKI: Thank you. My name is Burt Kaliski. I work at VeriSign, an Internet infrastructure provider.
The transformation we're seeing on such a remarkable scale to our mobile Internet is significant certainly that we no longer have the wires that are required to connect us to one another and to the services we'd like to interact with, but if that were the only change, the governance issues would not be nearly so complicated. If it were just that you had, in effect, a much longer wire that you can carry with you for your person interaction that you would be accustomed to doing on the desktop, you can do it at the desk when you are in a meeting facility as wonderful as this one.
The significant change is a transformation toward a user-centric opportunity for computing, communications, connectivity, and so forth. Something we can carry with us and that we can take to interact with the world around us. The late (saying name) often spoke of the time when computer interaction would change from users learning how to play with computers to computers and the network learning how to play with users. And the computers need to help us to do the things that make sense in our everyday lives and in business.
So take as one example an application that may be interesting and convenient. I have been exchanging business cards with many of you, as we have all been throughout these days. If we're all carrying our mobile devices, we might like at some point just to be able to exchange those cards more virtually. But on the other hand, if every time you are close to someone and a virtual exchange takes place, then doesn't that mean that people can follow you who you don't want to exchange things with.
Geo location is another issue. The tremendous advantages of being able know where you are and find where to go with maps or find products and services in your vicinity, but that raises privacy issues about who else can know where you are or you happen to be at a given point in time.
And furthermore, taking an extension of these mobile capabilities, not just to the devices that you and I carry but to the instrumentation of the world around us. We might like to point and click and open the door, order a meal, have a taxicab come, whatever it may be, by sending signals to the world around us, but again, that introduces additional issues on rights to access and to use and so forth.
So from the user point of view, a move from thinking of simply the mobility of the individuals to the world that we are creating that's even more connected and more useful with its challenges, from an infrastructure point of view, how do we ensure that the governance people agree on, for use, is effectively implemented in the foundations of the system that supports it.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you so much, Burt.
Now, Jackie, please.
>>JACQUELYNN RUFF: It's very exciting to be here and talking about this particular period in mobile services, which is truly transformational, as the statistics and the comments of my fellow panelists have described.
I'm from Verizon Communications, as was mentioned earlier, and along with many of you in this room I have been coming to the Internet Governance Forum and particularly looking at the access issues since Athens, since the beginning. And I think the prospect of having, by 2015, almost 4 billion people connected to the mobile Internet is truly remarkable.
So let me talk a bit about the question that was framed at the beginning. 3G, 4G, fourth generation mobile. I want to talk to that because Verizon, in the United States, is in the middle of deploying fourth generation wireless using that long-term evolution or LTE technology across our country.
And in the last year, we have deployed it extensively enough so that we are now covering about half of our population, approximately 170 million people covered, and we expect to complete that by 2013. Other companies are doing it as well, including my colleague from AT&T here. But I think what we have done is recognize as being the most advanced globally.
So what will this mean? A couple things. A number of things, all very important to our economy and emerging economies. Remarkable increases in speed, at least ten times as fast as 3G. Much higher in the lab. So it tests higher, but reliably, ten times faster. Reduced latency. Greater ability to maintain the security that some have referred to for our mobile communications. And then, of course, the transformational types of uses, if you think about real-time delivery of services such as remote doctor consultations in medical emergencies or a disaster relief that can be very carefully pinpointed.
The anywhere, anytime aspect of all this means that when a country does get coverage to the rural and remote areas, that applies there as much as it will in the middle of a city like Nairobi.
I think the other transformational piece of all of this will be the tablets that Jeff referred to earlier. If we think about education and those being in the classroom, we really have huge new opportunities in education.
On the video side, two-way video conferencing that will be important in areas where otherwise travel is virtually prohibitive.
And finally, machine to machine, to be able to do things like improve the economic and commercial opportunities around shipping, transportation, traffic, medical devices, and so on.
So these are incredible technological advances that will benefit all of our economies, emerging and those that are more developed.
A couple other aspects of this transformation. It is an example of the rapid pace of change, and the possibilities but not yet predictable business models that are happening at this point with this type of mobile service. It's an area in which there's a great deal of industry innovation, applications development, collaboration, multistakeholder engagement, and one in which government regulation has not been heavy handed, and that late touch of government regulation has contributed enormously to the innovation.
Then finally, just a thought on spectrum. Everybody is talking about spectrum. We have to -- spectrum has to be available. It has to be the right quality. In the U.S., we are using 700 megahertz, which is our former analog broadcast spectrum. That's very well suited for rural, urban, for exactly this type of service.
And my final point on all of this is to the extent that countries allocate similar spectrum, it will contribute to economies of scale. It will ease in roaming. It will avoid the need to have devices that are enormously complex, if there are many different bands that are located.
There will never be a single band allocated. I am just suggesting that if there are fewer rather than more, that can be a useful factor for the deployment and the availability of this type of fourth generation mobile service globally. And so it's probably worth thinking about.
So thank you very much for the introductory opportunity.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much, Jackie.
As I mentioned, we have our remote participant, that is Vagner Diniz from Brazil. If I am correct, it is 5:00 in the morning in Brazil now, so I appreciate being up for this panel so early in the morning.
I don't know how it's going to work, but can someone do the magic and have Vagner on screen? He is next.
>>VAGNER DINIZ: The filter of mobile internet --
>>SEBASTIAN BELLEGAMBA: Vagner?
>>VAGNER DINIZ: Yes. Can you hear me?
>>SEBASTIAN BELLEGAMBA: We lost the audio for your first minute, so would you please start over again? Sorry. We had an inconvenience here.
>>VAGNER DINIZ: Okay. So again, good morning. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to share with you my concerns and thanks for the organization to provide remote connection in our community there.
My first words about emergent issues and the future of mobile Internet are, there are shadows, there are shadows on us today, and I will try to explain very quickly.
Rapid development of mobile devices and connectivity has surprised us, how users of communication facilities, information, and services.
Mobile devices are now computing. Mobile devices connect us to the World Wide Web. And while this new world has global dimension and deep penetration in developing countries, at the same time it frightens us because we are increasingly dependent on operators, carriers, and device manufacturers.
It's a tough task to connect our mobile device to the worldwide Web today.
Somebody says recently, "Well, the Web is dead." I would say, "Hold on. Not yet."
But it's true that the world of PCs and the Internet emerges and evolves in an environment of openness and sharing, and today we see the future is increasingly less generous and more locked out for sharing and collaboration, and that's why I'm saying I can see shadows, shadows, and shadows -- (dropped audio) -- say that the PC revolution and the Internet were generative. They were designed to accept any kind of contribution from everywhere.
The PC revolution was possible only because anyone could create what they wanted in their open platform and then begin to emerge the closed softwater, open -- this open platform. Those softwares that we call the proprietary software: Text editor, spreadsheet, database. And the same thing happened to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the Web based on three simple and open technologies: HTML, the language; HTTP, the protocol; and URL, the identifier.
Without them, and if they were not open technology, the Web would not be what it is today: a global open collaborative and -- (dropped audio) -- for how long, I don't know. On this platform, on this Internet created by Tim Berners-Lee, emerged apps, applications, often closed in themselves. Social networks today do not talk to each other. Web sites that it's not interoperable. And devices that do not talk to other devices.
The latest smartphones are very stereo because their functionality is locked and does not invite invitation. So to conclude my first remarks, the open environment is where innovation happens. In a locked environment is where wealth isn't present, and my key questions for today is: Innovation is mobile is related to open or locked environment? What is likely to come next, a lockdown on PCs and mobile appliances?
My choice is for an Open Web Platform. Thank you very much.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLEGAMBA: Thank you very much, Vagner. I will now go with Ravi, please, for his initial thoughts. Thank you very much.
>>N. RAVI SHANKER: Thank you. I'd just like to take this dialogue a little further. The emerging issues, we have talked about the governance aspect but I am going to look at the technology perspective.
The mobile has been very popular because it's primarily an oral device, and while the Internet is something which is more text-based, I am trying to look at a situation where the mobile Internet is it only the access of the Internet on a device called a mobile or we are going to have some sort of Internet which is going to be mobile technology based, meaning is it going to be voice-based.
So I would like to open the dialogue whether the future we are looking forward to a voice Web or the semantic Web as some would like to call it, because I feel that a large number of people across the world are belonging to societies which are of oral tradition, so I would like to think of the voice Web as the onset of the new Web, which would definitely propel the mobile Internet toward the next phase, just in the way in which the mobile itself has catapulted communications among individuals to a higher level across the world, with the statistics being about 5 billion mobiles as of now.
I would also like to take another tack, that predominantly the Internet has been deemed across the global as an Anglo-centric activity. I would like to sort of segregate from this particular facet and say that maybe with the onset of the voice Web, the multilingualization may get a higher degree of attention, and we must understand that in this world we have diverse languages and we need to see that there is ubiquitous activity of the Internet for all.
So multilingualization is the key on which we can have the Internet for all actually achieved. And I would think that the mobile Internet, with what I would like to call the voice Web, could be one of the proper links to see that we could take technology to the next thing.
The governance aspect of it is being discussed, but I would like to see technology evolve in such a manner that the inclusive growth and the inclusivity that we're all looking for, as the Internet as a catalyst for change, could come about.
Here I would also like to dwell on another aspect of its relation to the Internet per se.
We are talking of domain names and domain names we are hearing about gTLDs, new gTLDs, ccTLDs.
I'm also feel could that be something in the 10 years down the road, whether this whole concept of domain names will undergo a change. We have something called Facebook right now, but Facebook, could it morph itself into something different like if you're having a domain name, can we not have a face name. Why not have a logo and have that as the indicator? Because in the advertising world you use the logo. VeriSign is identified by its logo. In the same way, I could identify individuals or friends not by their domain name but by their face name.
So it's just the merger or a convergence of the Facebook and the domain name system. I'm just trying to put this because if you're going to use mobile as a device, why don't you have the storage of the photograph and that could become an identity unto itself. And it makes life much more easy.
If you happen to sort of miss the device, you could actually trace back individuals on the basis of mobile phones and I think these are all issues which come into the governance domain, as to the security, the privacy issues, but I just thought I would add one more angle to the whole dialogue and try to trigger some more thoughts on it. Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. We are -- we have one hour left. I would like to open up the floor for the audience. As -- do we have any questions coming from the audience now? Do we have any questions coming from remote participation? Not yet. Okay. We have one there. Please.
>>TOM WAMALWA: Thank you very much. My name is Dr. Tom Wamalwa. I'm the Dean of ICT at Inoorero University, and actually I'm very interested in what is going on because we have recently established a center of research and innovation and we are focusing on mobile computing and cloud computing. However, a few challenges that we are dealing with, in Kenya the challenge we are facing has to do with connectivity, finding cultural issues.
We feel that education will be the way to go. If you remember the -- the Internet problem of 2000 and 2001, it really affected innovation because initially everybody in the 1990s, mid-1990s, everybody rushed for it just like the gold rush in the U.S., and we didn't create the people, we didn't plan ahead, we didn't even train entrepreneurs on how even to develop a plan, and I see the same trend with mobile computing that if we don't plan ahead we are rushing and everybody is rushing. We all want to start some apps and so forth, but does this make business sense.
So I want the panelists to think about that critically, because I think one of the panelist talked about failure. It's going to be a major disaster if we have the same failure like what happened with the Internet in 2001 and 2002. Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. We're going to take a couple of more questions and we'll revert to the panel for answering. Izumi, please.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Thank you. My name is Izumi Aizu from Japan. I'm from the civil society. It could be a sort of comment and question. In March 11th, as you know, there was a big natural disaster that happened in Japan, and since then I've been devoting most of my work to the -- you know, to help the rescue, relief, reconstruction work, especially using the Internet mobile or fixed, and any other information, tools and devices. So there's some lessons and also questions, perhaps, to you.
First, a lesson was because we did some survey of 3,000 citizens in the devastated areas, what did they use in the emergency, one week, three -- one month, and three months. It's a very methodological study. Lesson Number one is we need a much more robust, mobile network, because it was the primary source during the real first few hours, to find out what's going on, find out what's going on with your family members but, plus, some of the latest technology we have had early warning systems. A few seconds or 20, 30 seconds earlier than the earthquake hits you, you receive some warnings, but accuracy was not as good as it could be. There --
[scribes have lost connection. Please stand by]
-- mobile devices, thereby it helped save -- talking functions with mobile, as you may know, with massive traffic, they had to put 90% or 95% restriction of the call, meaning only 5% or 10% of calls can be connected. So we also survey many people who were actually able to use mobile phones, 45%. But we also got a lot of frustration, complaints, and stuff like that.
For their sake, I mean, all the mobile operators are ready to expand their networks and try to configure these areas, but we really need to learn lessons about these, including the governance that there has not been a sufficient multistakeholder mechanism to deal with these kind of situations. A single operator can't really fix the network, but there was not sufficient coordination, even among the operators, the military, police, central government and these -- I'm sorry, so but these are the areas. But finally, the international cooperation is also very much needed because some of the systems called Ushahidi, which has been created from Kenya, has been used in Japan as well which was also used, I believe, in the tsunami, so these are the really good areas. And people became very, very dependent on the mobile network services. So much that in the case of emergencies, it would get a lot of more attention and we need to prepare for that. Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. Yes, please.
>>PATRICE LYONS: Thank you for letting me take the floor. My name is Patrice Lyons, corporate counsel, Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Bob Kahn is the principal of the organization. And Mr. Shanker, I listened to your comment.
In the early days of the Internet, there had been video, but in the early experiments, a long time ago, it was very limited, and the technology usually permitted text. It was very text-based. But as the technology improved, there has been a wide variety of information, video, text, audio, and the new services and processes that have been enabled in that environment.
But the representation of the information is uniformly digital, and so the computer would know the zeros and ones, bits.
So because of this, and the gentleman from Brazil who came in, he didn't want the information systems and the recreation of a Tower of Babel again, so there has been a focus on interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. Essentially our organization, CNRI, has been looking at this from the focus of actually managing data structure itself.
The bit structures that can be persistently identified, and the supporting registries and repositories, and then enabling the interoperability on a global basis of these systems so that all the different services and processes aren't operating as silos, that they're enabled to communicate in an interoperable way and expose their interfaces.
So I just wanted to share that because this is a serious problem that is arising, and we want to be able to not laden up this bottleneck going forward. Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. Can we stop -- okay. We have another question? Okay. Sorry. Let's have another question and we'll revert to the table.
>>FOUAD BAJWA: Thank you so much. Fouad Bajwa from Pakistan.
In the course of observing and researching into some dilemmas which have been emerging with the use of mobile telephony and Internet, there's always a question in mind that, for example, if my country, say in Pakistan, would project anything between half the population having mobile phone access, what does that actually come down to? How do we actually measure how many people are using services beyond the traditional fixed mobile services?
If we see the trend in the past three years, companies like Nokia have introduced headsets that are affordable in let's say anything between $10 to $15. Now, you would even find people who are so poor that they're unable to achieve like a daily income to feed themselves but they would actually have a cell phone, and what are they achieving through the cell phone? Keeping in touch, communication, so forth. But mobile Internet for them is -- they don't know what it is. And this goes on to very large populations in the developing world. When we say something like my country's context, 67% population is a rural population. The level of capacity to enable a mobile Internet culture really isn't there. What regulators are dealing with within their current environments are, let's say, introducing a certain kind of licensing enhancements and into introducing 3G, 4G, so forth, but that continues to only serve a certain group of population in a certain economic zone, number one thing.
How will regulators be addressing the issue of capacity building? How will they go beyond just the telecom operators and the Universal Service Fund into bringing these people to actually use mobile content in their own languages?
Issue number one, have we actually identified any development indicators to how we're going to measure the amount of development taking place in any particular region? What are our economic indicators? What are our social indicators? What are our political indicators? And the list just goes on and on.
Just to give you a small example, how many people have used their cell phone to actually call an emergency service? I know to some extent how much I use the phone to call say double 1, double 2, the 911 version of the Pakistan emergency service.
This is a very small example of what an economic indicator may be or a social indicator. It actually intervenes into each other.
The third thing which comes to mind at this stage is, how far are we from actually achieving, let's say, what my friend from Kenya and what Izumi was earlier mentioning, how far are we from achieving global standards in response to disaster preparedness? That remains a very good challenge still. The amount of disasters that we've been facing in our part of the world, I would say for Pakistan you remember the earthquake in 2005, you remember the floods last year, and the current floods as well in the country. Mobile phone telephony is supposed to play an important role within that context, but what happens when all your networks go down within those flooded areas?
So the question remains: How do we collaboratively achieve something at the global level which distills down to the local level disaster preparedness responses. Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. I will now revert to the table. Would you like to -- who wants to be first in picking up? Okay. Steve, please.
>>STEVE SONG: That's a great deal to digest. I mean, the richness of all that feedback.
But there -- so I just want to touch on a couple of things.
The first point is our inability to predict the future, and so when we are told that LTE networks are going to dramatically increase access, that's quite possibly the truth. Maybe the future is LTE. But I just want to remind you that in a similar kind of event here 10 years ago, mobiles weren't really talked about. They were, you know, executive toys.
5 years ago, at a discussion like this, we would be talking about the future of access and it was WiMax. WiMax seems to be dying a slow death.
3 years ago, did anyone talk about tablets and the potential of tablets in access issues? No.
So I think, you know, from an industry perspective, industry wants to make safe bets, and so they want regulation to support the bets that they're making.
We, as civil society, want to fail safely. We want to recover from the -- the industry makes bets and they make them on behalf of their shareholders. What we want in terms of a governance system is a healthy ecosystem that's going to see success replicate quickly.
So I think I -- I'm, frankly, uncomfortable with the sort of notion of mobile for development, because it's an ecology of technologies.
Next year, 2012, more than 1 billion WiFi chipsets will chip worldwide. That's more WiFi chipsets than mobile phones. And by 2015 WiFi in cars will be a multibillion dollar industry, yet I have not been to any WiFi for development events.
It's -- I mean, we live in a world of complexity and we need to plan for failure. So the gentleman from Kenya there who is saying, you know, "we need planning," we need to plan for things to go not like we expected them to go. We need to plan to be surprised and to cope with that surprise.
And to do that, we need diversity and an ecology of services and technologies right from the ground up, and so my last comment is simply on that issue of the gentleman from Japan talking about needing more robust networks and similarly, the gentleman from Pakistan talking about that. One of the weak points of mobile networks is that they are centrally controlled. They can be switched off centrally, just as we saw in Egypt.
Why shouldn't access, mobile, and otherwise, be more devolved? Why couldn't -- why shouldn't we have local mobile telephone companies?
I don't know of any reason why not, and I think it would increase the resilience of the network to actually diversify actors in the market and the technologies and the use. And that just picks up lastly on the issue of interoperability and designing for interoperability at all levels. Thanks.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. Who would like to go? Hossein.
>>HOSSEIN MOIIN: I would like to join the debate. Thank you, Steve, for this comment, and also excellent questions.
I'd like to concentrate mostly on the Japan, what happened in Japan, the networks in Japan, et cetera, because it's something is both very dear to me and it's something I have a little bit of understanding.
I believe that in the old days of telecommunication -- go back maybe 30, 40 years -- there were two sacred principles in telecoms. One was five nines and the other one was universal access.
In the mobile, we do not have either of those two requirements. There is room for policy, perhaps, in that domain.
What does five nines really mean? It means that you cannot fail, effectively, for more than a few minutes per year. Mobile networks are not designed that way.
So here from a technical perspective, we have a divergence.
And part of the reason that they're not designed that way is due to cost. Actually, mobile networks are far less expensive to set up than fixed networks are as a result of these highly available systems. So what we see is a tradeoff, effectively.
Now, what has happened is that the society has moved on, and the dependence on ICT, and in particular on mobile communication, has increased.
We depend on ICT in all spheres of life. The money that we think we have is no longer banknotes but zeros and ones held somewhere remotely in a bank.
The friends we have are digital impressions of people once we used to see on a daily basis and now we only see on social networks.
So this is how far and wide ICT has penetrated all spheres of life.
And then when a disaster happens, be it a flood in Pakistan or an earthquake in Japan, we come to realize that perhaps we did not design the systems that we now depend so much on to fail safely, and this is a great shortcoming.
So we have the technology. We know how to do these things. We've done them before.
Take -- I come from Iran originally. Take Iran. In 2006, Iran had a terrible earthquake in Bam, a city that cleanly was wiped off the map, and then you see what happened afterwards. Within a span of 30 days, mobile network operators in Iran, together with ourselves and our competition, we set up an actual -- an effective network in less than 30 days in Iran. And this is not Japan. Japan is a most -- most highly developed country in the world. Iran is not that. But we managed it in less than 30 days.
So what am I trying to say?
I'm saying we can depend on technology, but we need to bear the costs. So it won't be free. We need to write investment policies. We also need to be aware that the policy choices we make have a bearing on how we can respond to failures and what are the costs of responding to those failures.
But I'd like to also say how well, despite what I heard earlier from you, Japanese network operators, be it DoCoMo or Softbank or KDDI responded to disaster, how tirelessly we and them worked together in order to overcome the challenges, and this is something that I'd like to acknowledge and say, you know, this is great work.
And within a span of a few days, mobile services were up, and why many people could not make calls is because radio is a shared resource and we needed to reserve part of that for the emergency services that were working tirelessly on the ground.
So, yes, technology can improve and I can guarantee you it will improve, but it will require investments and the right policy framework.
So with that, I'd like to close.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. We have time for one more intervention from the table. Jackie.
>>JACQUELYNN RUFF: So let me respond to a different part of several of the questions and that is the -- that the usage of these wonderful new services. Education was described. The question from Pakistan I think raised a broader question of how will these services be used effectively, how will they be measured, how can countries learn from each other.
And I think it's very important to have that issue be identified out of this session as one of the emerging issues. Namely, we have new connectivity, new technology. We also have existing technology that could be used even more. And the real question is what are those uses and how do we do the capacity development, including the human capacity development, along the way.
Education is a great example. There is probably even in this region more connectivity to higher education, for example, than is actually being used because of the need to do the training of faculty to make sure that the actual implementation of the I.T. systems on campus is being done right.
It sounds maybe even boring in ways but it has to be done in order to realize the possibilities here.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much.
Do we have any remote questions? Claudia?
We have time for one more from the remote, and the gentleman over there.
Okay.
No?
Okay. Please.
>> I am Ronald from Kenya. I am with the Association of Computing Machinery.
My question is basically on mobile Internet and access for persons with disabilities.
I will give an example of maybe the blind. We find that when they are accessing the Internet, even the HTML tags have to be read out, which means they are not able to get that specific information with the speed that is required. There is some delay. So the urgency is not there.
What is being done to ensure that we have equal access for all in terms of persons with disabilities?
Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. We had one question here, and one over there, and that's all we can get.
>> My name is Francis of Sectech (phonetic) Systems. I am actually the project manager.
I am deeply concerned with the speed of megabytes. Actually, the speed of Internet within, actually, Nairobi and its environs.
Is there a way that organizations can come up or other companies can come up from Europe that can bring up ideas that could speed up megabytes in terms of accessibility on Internet services?
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Sorry, the mobile Internet?
>> No. Internet as in cyber cafés.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: But this session specifically deals with mobile Internet.
>> It's mobile. That's all right. Then I'm sorry. It's okay.
Thank you.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you.
>> The prime issue which has been discussed and shared was though we have seen rapid growth in the mobile telephony, but why is it that, especially in the developing world, mobile Internet is not being picked up as rapidly as the mobile phones have been adopted?
So in this regard, we in India, we tried to find out, and we found that the key challenge there is that the number of applications which are there which can run on low-cost phones are really limited.
So in this regard, especially with regard to, like, to push the mobile Internet usage in the rural areas and for more socially relevant things, can we think of creating the governance issue, I am coming to that, can we think of creating a institutional mechanism wherein a kind of a global apps store is created and all applications related to maybe education, health, or financial services, whatever has been developed in any part of the world can be pulled into that global apps store and we can build some business model so the interests of the developer community and the interests of the network operators, because very often there are issues between on revenue sharing between the network operators and the application developers. If that can resolve at a global level and applications across the world can be shared so that whatever is happening in India can be shared in Kenya and whatever Kenya is doing can be shared somewhere else.
If through the U.N. or through the IGF this kind of framework is created, then this will really help pushing applications which will be relevant for people to use in the rural areas.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much. We have time for a really brief question over there.
The gentleman over there had his hand raised.
>> Thank you very much. I just want to mention one thing. Asia -- I am from Bangladesh. I am a member of parliament, and I am the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Post and Telecommunications.
As you know that Asia is a backwater area where the majority of the poor people live, and the backhaul cost and terrestrial -- the broadband connection there is very costly. It is one-third -- Europe and America is one-third less than the Asian costing. So I propose that because Asia is connected by submarine cables and kind of surrounded by oceans, what I want to propose is to reduce the cost of the optical broadband connection, if the Asia continent can be connected by terrestrial network, we, in Asia developed 32 countries. They are developing Asia in transport network. Beside that transport and build network, a terrestrial information highway can be developed, and in that level the major nations in Asia can take the lead. And if that is possible, then you can reduce the cost of the present high-speed broadband connection by at least two-thirds.
Thank you very much.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. From Burt, please. Burt, sorry, one second. Vagner, if you are hearing, if you would like to intervene, let me know.
Burt.
>>BURT KALISKI: In my initial remarks I spoke about the transformation to a user-centric view of computing. And several of the earlier remarks and these questions picked up on that point about the importance of developing applications.
So of course we must develop infrastructure to provide access and so forth, but access for what purpose? For the purpose of the social and business use cases which are then applications.
The good thing about the applications is that they are very portable. Infrastructure is physical investment.
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...constantly watching out for good practical models that are being used in Africa and Asia and elsewhere that can be adopted to their situation small islands developing states.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you. There was a comment or question in the back.
>> Thank you. My name is Jerma (phonetic). I just want to let you know that in Africa we have developed, in order to coordinate various aspects of mobile application development, African Mobile Application Development Association whereby we want all these applications to put in and also indicate new applications that is going to come.
This organization is pushed and promoted by ICT Labs International. Just information sharing.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you. Zahid.
>>ZAHID JAMIL: Thank you. I was listening to the radio this morning on the way here, and I heard an ad that said there was a lady who used to use a mobile phone, and basically she had a conversation with an old man who used to stand in line, and saying -- I won't go into all the details, saying that old man won't have to stand in line anymore. That is the beauty of the mobile technology and the payments and bill payments, et cetera, that Kenya has seen.
Now, with respect to that, there was a whole workshop yesterday where they talked about Safaricom and Orange were there and they talked about the fact that this has been a success in Kenya, and it is because it was telco led. Telcos were given the ability to do some of these payments. And that was what Safaricom's, at least, view was. And there are other views also in other regions.
But we see that banks don't move that quickly in developing countries. They are extremely conservative. They don't move as quickly as we would like them to. And if we want to get this mobile technology out into developing countries, I think it's a good idea to talk about the governance issues which allow the telcos in those developing countries to be able to invest in these technologies and payment systems, et cetera.
We have seen that in India, we have seen that in Bangladesh, we have seen that in Kenya and other places. And it works in Philippines, for instance, as well for remittances.
And one last point about a comment that was made by the gentleman, the parliamentarian from Bangladesh, about cost. I think it's also important to note that in a country like mine, in Pakistan, if I were to make a call to the U.S., it's very, very cheap because the termination cost at that end are cheaper. But if someone from the U.S. is going to try to call Pakistan, it is deliberately kept high because incumbents and everybody else in a position try to keep it high.
So maybe there are some issues in governance that developing countries need to deal with as well, and their regulators, to try and make sure that access is made easier by local regulation in telecom as well.
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you.
Are there any other comments in the room? Okay. Gentleman here.
>> Okay. Do I have to introduce myself again? Francis of Sectech (phonetic) Systems.
I am deeply concerned with the SMS's that come up on cell phones in terms of either things like threats on mobile phones and SMS's of jobs that will never be, to most companies and institutions that have just come up with ideas where they can chip in money in terms of, you know, doing that kind of stuff. I don't know how they roll it out. But is there a way or a formula that these kind of ideas could be stopped on people's cell phones? Because they have become -- actually, I can call them a menace. And something needs to be done. How can it be coordinated with the government to stop these kind of ideas?
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you. Fouad.
>>FOUAD BAJWA: Thank you very much. Fouad Bajwa from Pakistan.
I am just going to let you know, bend your -- twist your arms a bit with regard to the development angle in Internet governance.
What would be the three most pressing issues by each speaker with regards to development that you would like to address or like to see addressed anywhere in the world with regards to mobile technology as an emerging issue in the short term of, let's say, one year?
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you.
I have an announcement. Unfortunately, we did not get the names of the people who made excellent intervention, questions in the room. So if you can please write your name on a piece of paper and bring it up to the room afterwards, the Secretariat will capture that and make sure it goes into the report and we will be around here after to do that.
So okay. Why don't we take one more question and then we are going to let the panelists respond to any of these questions, and also do their concluding remarks.
>> Thank you, Chair. My name is (saying name) and I am ICT advisor in Rwanda. The gentleman over there was saying about mobile technology and financial transactions. I think that is really the emerging issues, and a lot of innovation is happening in Africa. What I think is exciting is now, you know, all these masses, they would actually have a chance to have a credit, because all these people, actually -- you know, if you have these people's data about payment histories. If they pay their electricity on time, if they pay their water on time, if they pay their student tuition on time, these are the credit record that all these people did not have before.
And I think these mobile companies have this data, turning to the credit, and then if these people could really start accessing the hard-earned credit using this mobile technology, I think we have really explosion of small and medium-sized enterprises. Not only I.T. sectors, but throughout.
Now, the thing is I think the Minister of Finance or the financial system, financial regulators are not up to standard on this. I think it's really important for the ICT community as a whole would start pushing how can we actually use these exciting opportunities to turn into real social and economic gain.
So I just wanted to get your point -- your views on that. Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you.
So we are going to go through the panel again, and if any of you want to take on Fouad's challenge of specific tangible ideas for promoting development, that would be great. And we will start with Steve.
>>STEVE SONG: The three things I would do are diversify, diversify and diversify.
I think the key to a robust communications future is having many options for connectivity. Give an example of this phone here. This phone is a GSM device. It is also a Wi-Fi device, which is not that remarkable except for the fact that it's very hard for me to make a call when I am just connected to Wi-Fi. Why is that? It doesn't make any sense. Why shouldn't, when I am inside connected to a Wi-Fi, an arguably cheaper network, why shouldn't my calls cheaply go out over Wi-Fi? Why shouldn't my calls seamlessly hand off between Wi-Fi and mobile networks. Why shouldn't mobile networks just be like smoking, something that you only do when you are outside?
I think we need to think creatively about the sort of communications ecology that we're building to build in the kind of fail-safes or safe-fails and redundancy that is essential. And the key to that, I think, is not only diversity but interoperability. So insisting on interoperability standards. For all the miracle that M-Pesa is, it is also one of the cheap tools of vendor lock-in for Safaricom.
So there are prices to pay for not insisting on interoperability standards, whether it's an interoperability standard at the device level, at the application level, or at the service level. Why shouldn't the consumers have more choice? And from a governance perspective, why aren't we insisting on more choice for consumers?
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you, Steve.
Hossein.
>>HOSSEIN MOIIN : Thank you. Let me just open -- or close by saying I'm really pleased to hear the richness of questions and coming from very many different angles.
Usually, as a business person, I don't get to hear diverse opinions, and this is very refreshing, so thank you for that.
There are a number of things that I would like to say. One is that, in general, as a technologist, I have long learned that we always overestimate the impact of technology in our immediate future, but always underestimate its effect on our society in the long term. So we're talking about policy. Policies do live a long time. So what is important to me is to ensure that in IGF and in the U.N. and also within national governments, we promote policies that accomplish my vision of the future. And my vision of the future is a very simple one.
I would like to ensure that every human being, by 2020, will have access to one gigabit of data per day for less than a dollar a day. This is not out of our reach. But we need the right policies. We need the right partnerships. And we need the investments.
So what is the key bottleneck here? The key bottleneck is to ensure that we have an investment-friendly environment, to ensure that we have, as Steve pointed out, a very diverse and broad ecosystem. And last but not least, to ensure that there is a risk/reward system which is fail-safe. And it is fail-fast. So we can do a lot of experimentations.
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you, Hossein.
Burt.
>>BURT KALISKI: I take a longer-term technical view in my role, so I'm not sure I can answer what I would recommend in the next one year, but I will give you three words to start with s for longer term: standardized, share and secure.
Standardize is so important to achieve these goals of interoperability, openness, access, portability, and so forth in digital form, and standardizing doesn't simply mean everything is the same everywhere. It means that the things in different places can be made portable, independent of the underlying infrastructure and so forth while still having diversity.
Secondly, the sharing. Sharing of experience.
Now that we are a much more connected digital world, it is so much easier to share what's going on, even as we are seeing in this particular session. That sharing has a tremendous impact on our ability to solve problems together, especially as we put together the great minds represented here and remotely, we see things in new ways and the Internet can help us to do that.
And third, the security element. Securing against accidents and attacks. Not all the forces in the world are working in the same direction, but working together we can achieve strong objectives if we understand both the threats and the countermeasures.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you, Burt.
Jackie.
>>JACQUELYNN RUFF: So I'm going to try to, in part, respond to the ideas for the next year and also do a little bit of wrap-up, perhaps speaking some to the openness theme.
So for the next year, important areas to focus on, getting spectrum policy right. Again, I would go back to the notion of looking at what bands are being allocated. I was just thinking, even looking at it on a regional basis. So, for example, in North America, we have the U.S., Canada and Mexico all looking at 700 megahertz, and that will do a lot in terms of roaming and costs and the affordability issue. So those sorts of regional looks would be important.
Second, on the theme of investment friendly, which I think is very important, that one of our panelists has been emphasizing, two thoughts there. One is to avoid excessive top-down regulation that could chill innovation and also in ways interfere with the kind of open Internet governance that we are all looking for. And also watch out for, perhaps even look around within your countries to see whether there are any barriers right now or under consideration to cross-border services. If you are thinking of wanting to get the economic benefits of cloud services, requirements of keeping data only in a country or keeping certain equipment only in a country can impede that global ability to access those services, which can be very important. Again, whether you think about it from a school, university that's trying to connect globally or a small business that wants to increase its capabilities in that way.
And then third, as we have talked about here, working within the communities and the multistakeholder communities to develop ideas on what can be the useful services. What sorts of capacity development, human, technological or network is necessary to make those a reality.
And let me just end with a couple thoughts on how the advent of these services, the expansion and the ways of working with them, can truly preserve and enhance the type of openness that we all care about here.
So first, just having another several billion people connected to the Internet as a result of these technologies in and of itself enhances human rights and ability to communicate and influence policy and have greater transparency.
Second -- I just have three quick points. Certainly for our company, and for many, the opportunity to move into, enhance third generation or fourth generation has created a situation where it's in our business interest, actually, to share the technological dimensions and features of our plans in order to get others to write applications or work with us, because we will not get a return on investment just by ourself. There has to be that entire ecosystem. And so we have been very active in trying to encourage that and set you the facilities, have an innovation lab and so on.
And then finally, I would say that the focus always just has to be consumer-centric. So some of the emerging issues we haven't really talked about now as much -- quality of service, privacy, all of those kinds of things -- are very important and I think if we just keep as our guiding principle, wherever we are, whether it's an NGO, a business, a consumer user, if we can work together with a focus on consumers, the users, and multistakeholder processes to get these things right, then we will really realize the promise that's out there.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you, Jackie.
Vagner, can we connect you remotely for your concluding remarks?
>>VAGNER DINIZ: Yes, you can. Can you hear me?
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Yes, you can.
>>VAGNER DINIZ: Okay. Concluding, Mr. Song said it's impossible to predict the future. It's very true. But one thing is possible to foresee. More and more mobile devices will be connected to the Internet. Not only cell phones, but our cars, watches, fridge, things will be connected. And the only reason to connect our things to the Internet is because we want them exchanging information with other things for our convenience and to attend to our necessities.
So back to my point, openness is the basis for interoperability. Investment in infrastructure is important but will not solve this problem. We will have devices connected to a great infrastructure but not interoperable. To have full mobile service out in the developing countries, one key issue is to assure open environment, open data, open code, open Web. Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you, Vagner. And Ravi, you get the last word.
>>N. RAVI SHANKER: Thank you. I'll keep it simple. We go back to the core principles of IETF. The three most pressing issues are access, diversity, and security.
I repeat: Access, diversity, and security.
Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you. And thank you to all the panelists. Just a reminder. Anyone who made an intervention or asked a question, please bring your name up to the front. And since we have a few minutes, yes.
>> Thank you very much. As I said earlier, I have one thing I think we forgot. Anyone who has done computer science, there is always input process and output. Out of all this technology, the mobile technology, how are we going to handle the e-west. We need really to come up with a formula, because I think one of the panelists talked about standards. Right now, I have different mobiles from different carriers. I cannot pick one and go and change because of the standards and also how to dispose of them if you don't need them. Thank you.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Okay. Thank you. Lillian, chair, you want to close?
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Thank you, Jeff.
It's been a pleasure to share this session on emerging issues, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your comments, contributions. Sebastian, Jeff, thank you for keeping the session moving. And a special thanks to our panelists.
As I mentioned in my introduction, governance and the mobile Internet is of great importance, particularly to us from the developing countries, where we are experiencing explosive growth in the use of mobile devices, but for all the opportunities, mobile technologies, whether it's 4G or LTE, or the innovations that we see in the use of smart devices, we still think that the wired Internet is still more important to us. As you've all seen or you may be aware of the many cables that are landing, particularly on the East African coast, we cannot ignore the impact that they have created for connectivity in this region, so as we try to find new ways on how to connect to the Internet through the use of mobile technology, we still have to think about how the wired Internet has made us able to connect, to bring us together to where we are right now.
With these few comments and closing remarks, I would like to, once again, thank our moderators, panelists, and the participants for making this session happen, and a special thanks go to our interpreters for the special work they've done to make us all connect to the different languages that we all speak.
I would like to call this session closed and I would like to pass on the microphone to the Secretariat for any logistical issues. Thank you.
>>SECRETARY: Okay. Thank you very much. We would like to adjourn this session and please do enjoy your lunch, which is going to be served, and then come back to the sessions as you have in your schedule book. Thank you.
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