Reaching the Next Billion(s)
Access


Chair: Kiran Karnik, Founder-Director of ISRO’s Development and Educational Communicational Unit

Moderator: Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director, Association For Progressive Communications (APC)

Panelists:

Demand:

  • Rajnesh Singh, Regional Bureau Manager for South and Southeast Asia, Internet Society (ISOC)

  • Mr. Shri S.K. Gupta, Advisor (CN) Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)

Supply:

  • Jacquelynn Ruff, Vice President, International Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs, Verizon
  • Peter H. Hellmonds, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Affairs Division, Nokia Siemens Networks

Development:

  • Allison Gillwald, Associate Director, Economic Development Growth and Equity, EDGE Institute, South Africa

  • Abiodun Jagun, Research Fellow in the Department of Management Science at the University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow

  • Brian Longwe, Chief Executive Officer InHand Limited, Director, African Internet Service Providers Association (AfrISPA), board member of African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC)

Panel Description:

Reaching the next billion(s) will primarily take place in developing countries. Ensuring access to the internet will revolve around finding governance solutions in three main areas of supply, demand and development:

  • Supply: the enhancement of the development of and access to infrastructure - in recognising that the availability of internet infrastructure needs to be considered hand-in-hand with the affordability of the infrastructure, this calls for the consistent implementation of competitive regimes and the creation of incentives that facilitate the co-existence of competitive and collaborative models for providing and/or improving access.

  • Demand: the localisation of ICT and Telecom policies and regulation ﾖ refers to calls for a review of the ways in which access issues are articulated and ICT/Telecom policy and regulation is formulated.  It asks that the translation/customisation of largely urban-centric policies be challenged and that greater emphasis be given to demand-side characteristics and the needs of rural/local communities.

  • Development: promoting the development potential of ICTs and integrating access infrastructure initiatives with other basic needs ﾖ calls for a multi-sectoral approach to infrastructure development and regulation; specifically the integration of ICT regulation and policy with local development strategies, as well as the exploitation of complementarities between different types of development infrastructure

Access to the Internet is facilitated by policy approaches that make it possible for the Internet and supporting infrastructures, and applications and services to get to more people around the world. Regulatory and policy choices impact innovation, investment, and new technologies, as well as usersﾒ options and experiences.

This main session workshop will focus on 3 aspects of access to the Internet which will help to bring the Internet to the next billion or billions of people:  demand, supply and development, and explore each of these layers through the lens of governance issues. Each of these layers will be discussed emphasizing the regulatory and policy issues, at the global, regional and national levels with a special emphasis on human and institutional capacity building.

The panellists in this interactive workshop will build on the access discussions at the previous two IGFs by sharing concrete examples and experiences of emerging fundamental principles that ensure increased access is supported by the necessary policy frameworks; highlighting governance options that impact supply, demand, and development.