IGF 2016 - Day 3 - Room 4 - WS37 - Internet Fragmentation: Getting next billion online

 

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. 

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>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Hello, everybody.  We are going to get started in a moment.

Two minutes!

They are getting the audiovisual and the video ready.

(Pause.)

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Okay.  They are ready to go.  We are going to go ahead and start.  Did you want to say something at the beginning?

>> SOPHIE TOMLINSON:  Thank you so much, everybody who came to this workshop and all of our panelists.  We will be doing breakout groups in this workshop.  We count on your participation and enthusiasm.  Thanks a lot.

Oh, I'm one of the organisers, Sophia Tomlinson, for this workshop.  I'm Sophie Tomlinson from the International Chamber of Commerce.  This is also cosponsored by the Government of Egypt and the Internet Society.

>> ROBERT PEPPER: I'm Robert Pepper.  I am at Facebook.  And this workshop really grew out of a series of, I guess it was, I don't know, many workshops or whatever we want to call them that Carolyn Nguyen and David Vyorst.  David, from ISOC in Washington, D.C., had a series of workshops looking at Internet fragmentation.  Internet fragmentation, looking at it from the technical, the policy, the business, a variety and range of issues related to this question, this notion of Internet fragmentation.

At our first workshop U.S. Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda said that one of the things that from his perspective that is leading to Internet fragmentation was the fact that 4 billion people on the planet were not connected to the Internet.  So a lot of the discussion about Internet fragmentation.  We want the Internet to be global, end-to-end.  There has been discussion, there was a great paper that was commissioned by the world economic forum on Internet fragmentation.  That's available online.  But I'm sure some people will raise it.  It talks about what fragmentation means.  There are different ways to think about it, in terms of this global network of networks.

But one of the biggest factors in the fragmentation, not just of the Internet, but not having global benefits and connectivity is the fact that there are over 4 billion people not connected.

So we are very lucky to have panelists, because this is the Internet Governance Forum.  It's multi-stakeholder.  We have stakeholders from every constituency:  Civil society, government, private sector, the technical community, international organisations, and everybody here in the room.

As I said on a couple of sessions earlier in the week, just because people are designated or sitting at the table and this were as part of the preparation process as speakers, everybody in this room is an expert and everybody in this room will have an opportunity to have an intervention.  That is the way it should be.  And that is one of the defining characteristics of the Internet Governance Forum.

The second thing that we are going to do, after we have the opening, the first part where we are talking about various aspects of how different people are thinking about and trying to address Internet fragmentation or reasons why 4 billion people are not connected, we are going to have three breakout groups.  We will go to different parts of the room with the idea that again, the people here have real world experiences.  What we would like to do is identify some very concrete specific examples and proposals of how to address three different causes for why people are not connected.  And then come back and have reports out from that.

And if we are successful, at the end of the hour and a half -- I really appreciate people being here as opposed to at lunch, right?  The food will still be there.  So right before we all go down to eat, we will be able to have a report out on a list of some good practices and real world examples of how people, countries, communities are addressing some of these reasons of why 4 billion people are not connected.

And some of you have heard me say in the past that I don't believe in best practices.  I think of a menu of good practices.  Because one size doesn't fit all.  So we need to learn from each other what works in different places and how we can then apply that in our local situations.

So we are going to go ahead and start with our first set of presentations from the -- these are going to be lightning rounds, right?  Again we only have an hour and a half total.  The idea is to put some things out there from the various speakers to get things going and we will go into breakout sessions.

So we are going to start with Christine Ardia from the government of Egypt.  Thank you for joining us.

>> CHRISTINE ARDIA:  Thank you, Robert.

Okay.  I want to thank ISOC for organizing this workshop.  I think it is very important because it is a different dimension of Internet fragmentation.  I thank you as the moderator.  So I will start off by looking a bit at fragmentation from the perspective of, I work for Egypt for the telecom regulatory authorities.  I will touch on cases most relevant to Developing Countries.

So fragmentation, this great paper that you referenced has put forward a lot of great literature about what fragmentation is, what are the different cases, all that.  All those classical issues, they are valid for Developing Countries.  When you look closer at Developing Countries you figure out that fragmentation has made a wider or broader dimension.  It is not just about willing points of connectivity not being able to be connected or being obstructed in any way, but more of people getting online that are unable to get the very same experience that other users around the world are getting the experience.  This could be due to different reasons.  Infrastructure that is not stable, that is much less than elsewhere, so they don't get the same experience, the same services.  It could be because of affordability.  Prices are not affordable for everyone due to many, many reasons that probably all of you know about.

Also the point that not the language, all the benefits that you can get from the Internet is not the same.  So you are not opening up to users from Developing Countries with the same economic opportunities that you can get elsewhere.  So I think fragmentation from the perspective of Developing Countries is a bit wider when looked at.

You can also look at social fragmentation as you were saying.  We have so many unconnected people.  It is getting those online that is also specifically making that social fragmentation when it comes to the Internet connectivity.

So it is good that we are looking at fragmentation with the perspective of connecting the next billion, and we know the next billion are probably, 4 billions are coming predominantly from the developing world.  We also know that rates of a adoption in Developing Countries is promising.  But we can see that gaps are increasing and not increasing.  We have users coming from Developing Countries but not coming with the same connectivity.  This is the part of fragmentation that we should be critically looking at.

Talking about cases, I picked three cases that I thought could be important for the Developing Countries.  So one of them is the case of the AP economy and the OTT case.  You have remarkable grasp of mobile devices.  This brings along OTT and devices that users in Developing Countries are using the Internet.  On the other hand operators are seeing the revenue shift.  That is classic.  They are not able to reinvest into broadband infrastructure as they used to.  The result is that we have lowered infrastructure.  So we have over booked infrastructure.  We have bad quality.  But we also have some trends that we are seeing in fragmentation, where the operators or the local service providers wants to throttle or block some of the services simply because they are picking into their pockets and they are unable to continue in that sense.

So in return, you sigh another trend of fragmentation where users start to use VPNs to overcome those restrictions, which is another trend.  The users are coming to the Internet with the whole garden concept, not opened to the full-fledged Internet.  They are coming in with that perspective.

So if you couple that with the policies that are not yet there when it comes to net neutrality in those countries, you figure out having a trend of increased fragmentation which is not really being a addressed by the policies as much as it should be quickly.  That's one case.

The second case is the zero rating case and the second class experience.  That is rated to affordability.  You have to go down with prices to get more user segments.  On the other hand, you have to have investment in infrastructure.  You get a lot of second class structure.  We see zero class structure.  Are they coming online with the same experience or are they having a light version of the Internet or the Internet that is for poor people?  That is the second trend.

The third trend, the emerging of cloud.  Services are coming quicker than policies are moving.  So the equipment is there.  For example, machine to machine, cloud and also people are adopting those services, but the policies are not going with the same pace.  The end result for that, governments are becoming protective, localizing data, doing some restrictions on cross-border movement of data because they are not ready with the policies for IoT and for cloud computing.

So those are the three cases.  There are other cases that may be less impactful such as spam and black lists.  The developing country -- there are issues of universal acceptance because of languages.  Those are other issues, but I try to conclude here.  I think developing the cans are more affected by fragmentation.  I think we need a lot of discussion between those who are in control, basically on one side local policymakers.  On the other side, private sector which is cross-border which is not within the local boundaries.  We need a multi-stakeholder dialogue specifically in there to solve those issues instead of having an increased gap.  Thank you very much.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you, Christine.  Verna Weber from OECD.

>> VERNA WEBER:  Thank you very much.  Hello, everyone.  Thanks a lot for inviting me to speak at this panel.  So in June 2016, actually a couple of months ago, the OECD organised a ministerial meeting on the digital economy in Mexico.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Mexican hosts for the tremendous job they did, as well as they are doing here for organizing the IGF.  We will report back during our Open Forum at 3:00 p.m. this afternoon.

So one of the four substantive pillars of this ministerial meeting was about what we termed Internet openness.  So which is basically the idea of the range of the sky, right?  At the OECD when we talk, we prefer to talk about degrees of Internet openness rather than Internet fragmentation.  And you can download the background paper that we did on our ministerial Web site.

And we proposed basically that Internet openness is a multidimensional concept.  So in our framework we have four basic pillars.  We distinguish technical elements, economic elements, social elements, and other factors such as for instance cybersecurity.

So technical openness, for instance, increases when openly available protocols or standards are used.  Social openness for us includes concepts that are related to human rights such as freedom of expression, for instance.  And then for us for the OECD, economic openness, or if you want economic fragmentations depends on the ability of the users to be able to access the Internet and to enhance opportunities.  This is where we see the link to connecting the next couple of billion users.

So actually you can think of the highest degree of fragmentation closeness, if people are simply not connected to the Internet.  Being able to connect has a lot to do with affordable access.  And for us, a lot of our research has shown that competition is a very powerful lever, if not the strongest lever to extend access to broadband connections to consumers.  It is competition that is driving prices down and encouraging innovation in the market.  We clearly see this in Mexico over the past years.  And another example that I have, and I would like to conclude with this example, is India where reliance industries has launched a 4G network called JIR after investing over 20 billion U.S. dollars.  They have to cover 90 percent of India's population during 2017 which would further increase competition in this market.  The company is currently not charging for data and voice as an introductory offer, but what we can see from the press and from their announcement, they want to continue to offer access at very competitive prices.  In addition, to address the issue of further availability and connectivity, they are planning wifi hotspots for which they leverage their extensive fiber network.  Thank you.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you very much.  Our next speaker on the list is Jimson.  I don't think he is here -- oh, you're here?

>> JIMSON OLUFUYE:  Yes, yes.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  They told me you were that side.  We met this morning.  How can I miss you!

>> JIMSON OLUFUYE:  Thank you very much.  I'm right here!  And please accept my thanks for all the work you are doing, Robert.  And I am thanking the Egyptian government for this very important workshop.  I am Jimson Olufuye for the African Alliance.  This is made up of companies and ICT associations from 27 countries in Africa.  I personally run an ICT firm.  We do data cybersecurity.  So fragmentation issue is a very serious issue because it has the tendency as we all know and agree to hinder the connectivity or the connection of the next billions to the Internet.

Those of us already connected, we are privileged really.  Let me say we are the affluent ones so to speak.  So those of us that are more in a good position so sudden really taking it seriously about reaches the next billions.

I want us to issue first and foremost is the issue of corruption.  In our recently when it comes to deploying the I am projects that get people connected, they are handled shoddily.  The principles are wrongly applied.  You find they are not sustainable.  Once they are connected one year, then the second year they are hanging.  They are held helpless.  So that is a major concern.

Administrative principles over universal service fund.  And also we need to be very flexible in this regard with the zero rating and all this technology application intervention to get people connected.  At least get them connected and then you can improve and make the choices and so on and so forth.  After all, we see how the measurement in terms of broadband, why people are connected to broadband and different category of broadband.  We see it every day.  Once you have your phone you can apply to move higher in terms of the level speed of access.

So that is to say that it is essentially a business issue.  Fragmentation is a business issue based on business models and so on and so forth.  We may have to live with it.  But we need to have in mind that we should consider people in the community basically.

We had this summit two months ago in Namibia.  And a major theme came out to me.  That is the gap between government and the private sector is really a huge gap.  And the gap is a major fragmentation really.  The private sector have resources and they are ready to deploy to under served areas, but they need government endorsement.  The connection was not so possible until that event took place and bringing them together, and the conversation is ongoing.

So that is why the multi-stakeholder principle of IG, we need to talk more about it.  I don't know how else we can push this information.  It's okay.  We need to talk a lot more about it at these fora.  That gap was really serious.

Technology fragmentation is coming up.  Another one is regard to DOA, digital object architecture.  This is something running on the Internet and you have some people having control over the handlers and principally government now.  And so it is a new ball game that is bringing up, some people are really cut off from this and they will now begin to strive again.  How do we meet up with those government who are in control of the handlers.  These are challenges with us.  But the point for me is that when we are talking about these fragment facial issues, we need to enable poor people yet to connect, to connect.  What is happening in India is good.  To connect, at least let them begin to use it.  To use it, they can move up the ladder.  But let's bear in mine the fragmentation at every different level, but we need to address it so that the poor in our midst will have access to the Internet benefits.  Thank you.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you, Jimson.  Next we are going to move to the first speakers -- well, we had government, we had international organisation.  We have private sector.  And now we are going to move to the technical community with Karen Rose from the Internet Society.

>> KAREN ROSE:  Thank you very much.  At the Internet Society, the two key themes of the current agenda are increasing Internet access and improving Internet security and trust.  And in addition, earlier this year we lost a project to take stock of some of the key forces of change that are going to change the Internet of the future within the next seven to ten years.  And to do so we have gone out to our community for their input and we've received so far over 1500 responses from over 156 countries around the world.

The issue of the digital divide and fragmentation, and the linkages are coming through as a big theme and concern for the future of the Internet.  Many contributors to our work see that the notion of the digital divide is really going to transform, and transform into a question not just about who has access and who doesn't, but about the disparities really in the practical ability to use the Internet for opportunity and advancement.  Very similar to some of the concerns that Christine well articulated.

As one of our participants noted, in a quote, he said the word "access" isn't enough.  The real question of the future will be what kind of opportunity is really available to you with the access that you have.  And on this score many in our community are really concerned about this gap, this new digital divide, the disparities between whether different countries, genders, social groups can meaning fully participate in the Internet, there is a concern it will grow in the future.  If we have sheer connect IT as our goal, there is a disparity in the ability to meaningfully participate.  Many see this potentially growing in the future especially because of this issue of fragmentation.

So some concerns that have been raised by our communicative are will some communities in the future be left isolated on IPv4 networks while the rest of the world communicates through IPv6.  What is the implication there for the ability to meaning fully participate in the Internet?

Will some communities be at a disadvantage relative to others because of policy fragmentation?  Government-imposed barriers to open Internet access or potential barriers to technology use out of fear of security concerns.

The potential for slowing investment in new infrastructure once basic access is achieved.  Meaning potentially that some countries and communities might not be able to innovate at the same pace as others.  Those that are already ahead will continue to move ahead more quickly than other communities just coming online.

One commenter from India really underscored this issue of the potential for growing gaps in the quality of access between the rich and the poor within countries themselves.  A lot of times we think about the digital divide between countries, but emphasizing this issue that if you're rich and have access to high-speed broadband, but you are poor in the same country and only have access through old technology or through limited technology, the difference in the opportunities of the Internet are vast.

These are just a few of the issues highlighted by our community.  To be sure, there's still a lot of work to do to get everyone around the world online.  I think this is a timely discussion because we not only need to look at the impact of fragmentation on today's challenge of achieving universal access, but what also fragmentation may do to create new digital opportunity divides in the future once people are online.

Thanks.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you, Karen.  By the way, to correct the transcript, I said Karen for some reason because they said it was Karen McCabe.  No, it is Karen Rose.  Karen McCabe may be in here but she's doing great work from the IEEE.  From the technical community we have two Karens, Karen Rose from ISOC an they are working together on a number of projects specifically on this.  And they are both blonde.  Maybe that's why the transcript got it wrong.

Move on to civil society.  Alison Gillwald?

>> ALISON GILLWALD:  Thank you very much.  I'm from research ICT Africa, which is Africa-wide network based in Capetown.  We do have sort of doctoral programmes and we are concerned with trying to build alternative strategies and appropriate regulatory frameworks in our countries, but it is very much applied research.  We are looking for solutions.  So I suppose a lot of the things I'm going to be saying are really about being very pragmatic, working with what we've got in order to make sure that we get people online.

I just think the qualification you made about what is fragmented, the sort of assumption that this free and open Internet is actually all out there and it is wonderful and we have to be careful that it doesn't get clawed back in any way, is simply not the case.  I think having the free and open Internet, the 1 billion connect projects and things that speak about equitable access and high-speed and quality and all of these things, wonderful as aspirational but maybe not in our life times.  What can practically be done, is important.

The fragmentation question then, you know, one needs to understand the extension of the Internet and the availability of the Internet as reflecting other global inequalities that are there.  And a global and national inequalities as you pointed out.  This is reflected if he national level.  In addressing that, as we know more people are getting online.  We are amplifying that digital inequality.  I think it is important to stress the inequality aspects of it that we see increasingly as people move into the Internet of traditional voice services, the opportunity to use Internet even if you have access you have access but don't have it because of affordability.

This creates a flexible enabling environment in many of our countries where we have fragile states or vulnerable states or states with limited institutional capacity to implement some of these things.  So creating environments that are certain, so you do get investment.  I want to respond to quickly in this regard to the issue of OTTs and the failure of investment because of the OTTs.

All the countries I worked in in Africa, there is no evidence of this.  Governments have to be careful of drinking the telecos Koolaid on this.  There is trouble with voice over services to -- we see competitive markets moving very effectively from voice services to data services, and billions of dollars of investment in order to do so.  Those are that are forward looking and are partnering with data companies and platforms to drive services which are driving demand and getting investments an creating their own content.  I think we need to be careful not to get stuck in a teleco world here.

That said, those infrastructures are critical and we have to create the right incentives for operators to go in there.  We can't adopt protectionist policies for investment that probably aren't going to see the kind of investment we need in this environment if we are not giving people spectrum.  Seeing in our environment the broadband are the way that massive people are accesses the Internet.  We see extensive fiber investments because of the business drive in this area.

I really think we need to integrate our tradition at teleco regulatory environment.  We need to get that right but need to leverage the resources we have in resource constrained environments.  We need to use private investments where there are there, incentivize those.  We have to get individuals to self provide where they are able to, and adopt policies that are not using net neutrality purist notions of the Internet that are simply not going to happen.

We should encourage any innovations that bring people online.  Whether it's zero services, limited cap 3G, emergency services all those things, we need to bring people online.  They are not going to be online on equal terms but we need to at least bring them online.

Yeah, let me end there and I'll come back to it.  Some of the issues -- one more thing I wanted to say was that in speaking about getting the open and free Internet out there, also in governance terms even in relation to technical terms, never mind in technical fragmentation, obviously technical fragmentation is our key issue and we want to ensure that there is not small Internets and things that don't work outside of China or some where else.

As technical levels we want to push that but we have to stop just speaking to governments who are feeling the anxiety of not having the critical resource and modern economies under their control.  We have to bring them in.  We have to reduce those fears.  We have to create systems of trust and involvement and participation.  There will be some governments that won't want to engage either on the technical side, the right side or whatever else it is.  I suppose there is not going to be a lot we can do about that.  Lots of governments are anxious about their data being in other warehouses.  We need to engage with that.  The implications are severe.  We have a enough of governments that are setting up, for example, internal eGovernment systems, internal communication systems that have seen the value of using cloud services, for example, at a fraction of the cost of other services.  They still have anxieties about where the data is going to sit and those kinds of things.  We need to engage with those governments far more than talking at them about what they should be doing in terms of privacy, surveillance and of course on the technical side as well.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you, Alison.  If I could really quickly, because you laid out a set of principles, but you do a lot of empirical research.  You mentioned the OTT.  In an earlier session you talked about your empirical research on the findings on zero rating.  Could you briefly report out on that?  And whether or not ...  (Speaker away from microphone.)

>> ALISON GILLWALD:  Yes.  So we do both supply and demand side work.  My colleague in the corner there, painstakingly collects every single piece of data cross 15 Africa countries quarterly, it is supported over many, many years and it is an extraordinary resource that tracks data prices, and various things that are happening.  That's the supply side database.

There is really the only empirical extent of supply side database to inform the discussion going on about zero rating.  On the demand side we have the ITT access and use surveys.  I quickly refer you to the paper because I can't summarize it here.  There is a paper covering four African countries on the ICC.net. It is a strategy used by operators per market share, retention and attraction purposes.  It is a whole lot of dynamic bundled services, et cetera, that are driving Internet take-up.  One of them is an important one.  We know from the demand side network, it is social networking driving the services and obviously the zero rated versions are that are allowing poor people to come online.

There are problems with the data at big data.  At the prepaid level, you don't know who the people are and, they are suggesting that some percent are moving through buying service.  From on demand side services we know that people are online but using the zero rated services.  It is addressing the usage we were talking about, intensity issues for people who can't afford those services.  There is more in that paper there.  Just to say that it needs to be understood rather than just with these blanket bans on the basis of information.  Before TRI on the banning of free basics, there was little information on the ground.  We need to look on a case-by-case basis.  All African markets have been provided, it is being provided by the late entrance mobile operator.  It is enhancing activity.  As long as people don't buy it, it is not going to be zero rated.  If less people move on to that, it won't happen.  Maybe anti-competitive for the content providers.  You have to address that in a different way.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you.

Staying with civil society, Sorina from DIPLO Foundation.

>> SORINA TELEANU:  Hello, everybody.  It is difficult to add something new to what has been said.  I will bring in a regional perspective.  I come from Romania, Southeastern Europe Region, not well represented at IGF and other Internet Governance spaces.  I will bring in the aspect and.

First of all we did a survey in the recently earlier in year an asked the community what are the main Internet relate the challenges.  Surprisingly, digital divide was the first one.  Yes we still have digital divide and access problems in our region with mainly unconnected regions and divides between countries, but also within countries.  I will give the example of Romania.  We have cities with high speeds and you might have probably seen Romania ranking high in broadband speeds but at the same time half the country is not connected.  We have that problem.  That means we need to build more infrastructure but at the same time the private sector is not so interested in investing because the commercial interest is not that high in the remote areas.  This is where the government should be intervening.  This was actually a recommendation that was made at our subregional IGF earlier this year, the southeastern European IGF, where people said there is a need for public private partnerships in order to build infrastructure in these areas.

This was about infrastructure.  Another thing in our region which is more related to the actual fragmentation, we see a lot of blocking, both by governments when it comes to content policy.  You want to avoid child pornography or online gaming.  And the solution, the government here is asking them to block certain content.  As both Internet Society and some organisations within ICANN have said blocking at the level of the DNS can lead to some form of fragmentation in the Internet.

But in the region we also have job blocking, companies from outside the region they don't offer their services within the countries.  That is another type of fragmentation for users in our countries.

And the last point I want to mention is about local content in local languages.  Some of you might know that our region is quite diverse not only in terms of languages but also scripts.  We have Latin, we have Latin with diacritic marks, Cyrillic, Armenia, Georgian and a diversity of scripts there.  There are efforts to implement the international domain names.  This is a good thing for bringing more people online, allowing people to express themselves in their own languages and scripts.

IDNs have problems.  Email addresses don't work well in IDNs and search engines do not recognize them.  This is a form of fragmentation.  Yes we have them but they are not reachable.

These are the main points in addressing fragmentation in our region in which we are trying to work within the southeastern European dialogue.  Thank you.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  This is an experiment.  We are going to break into three groups.  Question is, what are the groups going to do?  So we have been up here trying to distill in realtime a little bit three problem sets that people have raised about fragmentation, about leading to not having more people connected, 4 billion people connected.

We will have speakers who are part of the groups and will be reporting back.  In realtime we are making changes of the themes of the three break out groups.  So they are all going to have to listen carefully.

I heard, there are a lot of things put on the table, but I think there were three things that came through very, very clearly.  In multiple presentations.  The first one is that there is insufficient infrastructure for a variety of reasons -- I'm sorry, let me back up.

What we want to do from the breakout groups is have things that people are actually working on to solve those problems, right?  In a very practical way, solve those particular things that are leading to the fragmentation of more people not being connected.

All right.  One theme that came through was the network connectivity.  There is a subset which is there is no connectivity.  But multiple people said, well, you know, the connectivity we have is not good enough.  It may be either old connectivity and hasn't been up grated for real broadband or Christine, you know, mentioned operators that are not investing to upgrade from the old technology.  But in order to take advantage of, right -- I loved the way Karen and a couple of others talked about being able to take advantage, use and take advantage of being online and what are the barriers.  One of those barriers is the lack of good technology.  So why don't we have -- this is about insufficient networks and insufficient increasing capacity of networks as well as getting networks to places where there are none, right?

That will be one breakout group.

The second and the third break out groups, both things I was hearing about capacity building.  So part of, or one of the issues -- again it came up multiple times on capacity building.  The ability of people to use the Internet.  To meaning fully participate for people.  So there are projects and programmes working on skills, capacity.  Based on our main session yesterday, there is relevant content, right, and linking relevant language with local content, make can it easy and use to understand what the benefits are, that's a second issue.

So the second breakout group will be focusing on capacity building and local relevant content, local language.

The third breakout group, I heard a different issue on capacity building which I was not expecting to hear, but multiple people raised it.  That is helping government and government policymakers learn about the technology, the Internet, the benefits, what needs to be done to really for themselves to take advantage but also to create the right environment and enabling environment for Vega adoption and use and -- for increasing adoption and use and benefit of the Internet.  Part of this is about government capacity building, helping government policymakers learn more and do better and really appreciate.

So that I would propose to be the third breakout.  Again, I know that there are people in this room working with governments around the world and in your countries to help them go up this learning curve, right?  I was not expecting to hear that as one of the themes popping up, but it was.

What we are going to be is a little chaotic.  Why don't we have the first break out, which is the network infrastructure, meet over here.  Right?  And the second one on capacity building for individuals, meet over here.  And then the one on government capacity building meet back over there by the door.  We have 20 minutes.  Then at the end of it, it would be great if each of you could pick -- one of the people who will be presenting in the next one, try to distribute yourselves.  You can then report out and we'll have the other presentations.  Let's try this as an experiment and see if it works.  Twenty minutes!

Infrastructure here.  People capacity here.  Government capacity there.

(Captions are suspended during the breakout sessions, and will resume when the groups come back together.)

>> MODERATOR:  Three minutes!

(Standing by.)

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  If we can get back to, to finish up and bring your chairs back?

I'm glad everybody is having fun.

(Pause.)

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  I guess we could have had more time.  Okay!  I think there's a lot of activity, a lot of energy.  This has been good.  Unfortunately, we are going to be tight on time.  I think we can go over a little bit.  They still will be serving food downstairs.  So just to get on with it, there were I think two of our next speakers who were in the infrastructure discussion.  Izumi and Carolyn.  So why don't we, if you can report out?  Have you decided between the two of you how you are going to divide that up?  Or one of you start?  Izumi?

Izumi, why don't you start and then we'll go to Carolyn.

>> IZUMI OKUTANI:  This is Izumi Okutani.  I was in the group that discussed the infrastructure part of the fragmentation, how to actually try to reach out to those who are not connected.

We focused a lot on the benefit of community network.  That's where private sector is not able to accommodate, I don't know, the benefit or cost.  And some of the benefit of community network was being discussed that we could create price benefit that it might make it available more for users who don't have that much money, competent five private services.  Or it is also compared to subsidy by the government.  It makes the community be more proactive.  They have the sense that they have to maintain and operate the network.  So it leads to capacity building technically as well, rather than simply being a customer and then keeping receiving what they receive from the government.

But there are also challenges being identified such as how to actually start with funding.  One of the answers may be the governments provide the funding at the beginning and that the community continues to do the work.  Or how do you actually provide, stop connectivity in -- start connectivities in areas that are challenging, like Afghanistan or other areas where it's physically challenging to build a network.

There is reference to the group within IETF, GIGA.  How do you provide a combination of technologies in areas that are physically challenging?  This information is available but another point was that community network benefits, not just the Developing Countries but the cases even in Developed Countries such as Sweden where the community network is being built.  So these were the key points being discussed.  And remaining questions, what do we mean by community network?  Is it just grassroots community effort that tries to provide connectivity in the last mile?  Does that also involve projects with the government that it will provide connectivity to the Internet part?  Or how do you actually get started?  What do we actually mean by it?  These are still open questions we have within the group.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you.  Carolyn?  Oh, that was good?

Yeah.  Use this also as your opportunity to make your other intervention, okay?  So this is great.  Thank you.

>> IZUMI OKUTANI:  This is something that was not discussed in the group, but from my perspective on fragmentation I would like to touch on the two technical identifiers, IP Version 4 and IP Version 6.  This is an identifier that you need to connect on the Internet, like you need numbers for telephones.  The current version that most of the Internet users, IPv4 ran out of stocks.  We want the next Internet users fob IPv6 supported.  This needs changes in your network to purchase products that support IPv6 and there are certain features that are still not commercially available in v6.  There are things that each of us are able to do to promote v6 deployment in the Internet.  For example, governments can maybe request vendors to have more support on their equipment in the areas that is not supported or raise awareness by consumers that these are the products that supports v6 and make sure that you purchase them.

If you are a consumer for your home, make sure when you purchase anything for the Internet, make sure that it supports v6.  If it is not available, ask the vendors or the ISPs if they support v6.  This is what you can do on your own part to support v6.  There is only 8 percent worldwide, so there is room for people to make v6 available for the next 6 billion connections.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  I thought we would have extra time but I was told we have another group coming in.  We were having too much fun in the breakouts.  We have to keep our interventions short.  If there's a comment on the v6 stuff, I want to come back to that because this is quite important.  Maybe we can also take it outside the room as we go get lunch afterwards during the break.  But this is very important.  Carolyn?

>> CAROLYN NGUYEN:  I was going to yield because we were talking about IPv4 and IPv6.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  But we need to ... right.

>> CAROLYN NGUYEN:  With respect to fragmentation and the SDG, what I was going to talk about really, we think about fragmentation at the infrastructure level and fragmentation at the application level.  So fragmentation at the infrastructure level, efforts at community networking is critical.  The way we look at it, initiatives that we have been involved in, a critical element of that in order to make it sustainable because we want to link fragmentation to Sustainable Development Goals is the involvement of the local communities because they are the ones that know what the needs are.  They are the ones who will know what applications are necessary by the community, et cetera.  So in the initiatives that we have around the world, this is exactly what happens.

With respect to the funding question, it depends.  Some of it comes from government funding.  Some of it comes from global projects.  For example, from the World Bank, et cetera.  So we try to link that together.

As part of our efforts to do this, we have also put out there the affordable access initiative grant fund which is entirely about supporting local companies, companies that are with a few employees that have applications that they are bringing to markets for the local community and what they are looking for is a step in order to scale it out across the world.  This is part of our effort to support the Sustainable Development Goals but also increase connectivity at the infrastructure level.  And the companies that we have supported range from solar, energy access, et cetera.

And then at the application level one of the things that we have been working with is to create a trusted cloud.  So we have announced a commitment to invest a billion dollars to bring the power of cloud technology to serve the public good.  And over the next three years.

So we are looking to support 70,000 nonprofits, 900 University researchers and expanding broadband communities to 20 communities in 15 countries.  Very much implementing the on ideals that we discussed.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you.  I'm not sure where we'll bring it back in, but I do know that there is an issue of security that we want to be raised from CGI, but you also are going to be coming back on the government side.  I might want to weave that in when you come to that.  But there's he the notion of trust and the lack of trust which is keeping people from being connected.

For the moment -- we are really lucky.  Yolanda Martinez was able to make it back, and is really our host for the whole week.  Again, I want to thank you, Yolanda.  Yolanda was in the group about people capacity building.  So Yolanda, please.

>> YOLANDA MARTINEZ MANCILLA:  I would like to give this to Ms. Christina Cardenas.  Welcome to nooks once again.  I hope you are enjoying your time.  I'm going to see most of you around.

>> KAREN ROSE:  I'll do the report out.  I'll do the report and then give it to Yolanda.  We had a conversation in our group about capacity building.  We started with the notion talking about multilingualism and languages on the Internet.

The reality that unless people have the ability to get on the Internet and use the Internet in scripts in their own language, you can't even have sort of capacity building around that.  As a foundation, we need to make sure that there is more opportunity for non-Latin scripts on the Internet and for people to use them.

Secondly in terms of talking about capacity, there was a comment made that it's not just enough to train people on things like how to use the Internet or how to get on a computer and how to type things in and get online, but also there's a need for capacity building about what is on the Internet and what's in it for people.  Not just building skills but an awareness of what is on the Internet and why people should be using it to drive demand.

We had a discussion about formal education activities led by our colleagues from Mexico, and some of their experience and their focus on ensuring that youth are engaged in the Internet in classrooms early on.  But even in that, in engaging youth in the classrooms we had a discussion that sometimes we might have to reverse engineer from the bottom-up this notion of capacity building.  Teachers sometimes have lower skills than students, and some approaches for capacity building sort of go from a top-down approach of these are the things you have to learn.  The kids in the classroom and the teachers have their own ideas about what is going to engage them and what is going to build their skills.

Thinking about reverse engineering capacity building from the bottom up.

We talked a little bit about the importance of creating locally relevant content and the ability to grow the stills and confidence of people in creating content because this is also going to help drive demand for the Internet.  When we had a discussion that social media can be a really great way to help people build their skills and confidence, because the first step a lot of people make in creating Internet content is actually on social media platforms or sharing through social media platforms.

So that may not be enough, but thinking of that as a way to build skills and confidence so people can go and develop greater and larger bodies of locally relevant content.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  All right.  Thank you, Karen.

Did you want to say something else as part of your brief intervention from Maria Christina?  Because you were going to say something.  When we originally structured this, there were going to be the additional speakers to make points such as Izumi said IPv6, but again we are tight on time.  I want to give everybody an opportunity, but if there is a particular point that you wanted to make.

>> Well, thank you.  We were receiving everything in our group, as you mentioned.  We considered the training and teachers and the students to use technology, but also to the whole society.  We identified that we need to develop more the skills and understanding of what the Internet is for and if we do that we will be more able to have an impact with the Internet in the communities.

And the Internet was not considered before in the case of education, for example.  And now that we are showing what we can do, how we can connect with teachers, we change the whole view of how the education can change the new generations for use.  Such things as what Yolanda is doing, for example.  We are talking about, constructing for the future.  But if we don't teach the new people that we use that, we won't be able to use it the whole thing.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Gracias.

Thank you very much.

We have one more group, but two more speakers.  Carolyn, I'm going to come back to you if there's anything else that you wanted to come back at the end on some of the things you were otherwise going to stay.  I want to go to Stephanie McClellan from CGI.  She was on in the group on capacity building for government but you have important points to make about trust as it relates back to security, as well as a force, having people not connect.

So Stephanie, please.

>> STEPHANIE McCLELLAN:  Thanks very much, I'll try to be concise.  So in our group we had a great conversation.  There are people, representatives of different governments from different areas of the world, different Internet access levels.  A lot of it comes to capacity building, but in terms of improving institutions.  So institutions such as regulators who may not be able to push back against some of the big incumbent players in the market.  Sometimes that's a matter of not having capacity or a matter of having cases of nepotism or corruption in the government.

So that is certainly one part of it.  Another is looking at issues like infrastructure, looking at education as another institution.  So bringing across teacher training programmes that might require some government intervention to try to improve the institutions, like the education system.

Affordability is definitely another one of those.  Sometimes the government lacks the budget.  Or has to be sort of trained and encouraged to make space in the budget for Internet accessibility.

Other challenges include around the areas of monitoring and evaluation and stability.  Sorry, sustainability.  So making sure that it is not just a one-time thing where you implement a new programme but make sure it continues over the will coming years, and that you can build on it.

Alison raised an interesting point that some governments do see the importance of the Internet for improving their economy and helping their citizens, but some of them don't.  So for the ones who do see the importance, they might be limited by not having the strong institutions or not having the resources and the capacity to build that out.  For the ones who don't see why it needs to be a priority, that's something that needs to be worked on there.

It comes back to the idea of security an trust, which is what I focused on.  So if you don't have, a lot of times especially in Developing Countries, countries that are new to the Internet, security becomes an issue because you might not have the education to realise that you need to be updating your programmes and that there are security risks.  There's an element of computer illiteracy there.  There is an element of maybe people, higher rates of pirated wars.  You are not getting the security patches coming through.  A lot of time the Internet connection is done through mobile phones, those don't have the security standards that you would have in a normal laptop or wifi computer setup.

So for all these reasons there is research including an incredible report by Microsoft put out in 2014.  It kind of shows that when it comes to digital access and security, things kind of get worse before they get better.  So as the digital access spreads and a lot of focus so far has been on digital access and not on the quality of that access.  So in a lot of these cases as digital access improves, security measures don't keep pace.  There are higher incidence of malware and cyber attacks that happen.  In order to keep pace you have to push through the point where you get the access and the cybersecurity improving in lock step.  So a big part of that is building capacity within the governments, improving institutions such as, for instance, law enforcement where they may not have the training in digital technologies and cybersecurity.

So in working within existing legal platforms, kind of making sure that the existing laws include references to digital security and cybersecurity.

I am going to see ... I feel like I'm missing something.  I also know we are in a hurry.

Yeah, training, education again being part of that.  Basic digital hygiene and not just for the public at large but also people who work within the government to make sure they understand the importance of this as well.  For civil society organisations.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Sorry, I'm being told we are being thrown out of the room.  I apologize, Stephanie.  Some of the recommendations that you just made on security, right, are also about capacity building in governments as well.  These are really linked together.

A couple of real quick things before we run.  I apologize, we ran out of time.  Carolyn, are you okay?  I think in some of the will projects you are working on -- it's important that the private sector have that opportunity.

A couple of quick things.  One, there is, for those interested in IPv6, there's an IPv6 best practices workshop when?

>> It was yesterday, but the information is available on the Web site.  So click the schedule under the presentation.  It gives key points and the document is available as well.  It would be great if you take a look.  Thanks.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Thank you.  Second, everybody here in terms of the writing up the results.

>> We have Hisham from the government of Egypt who has been the rapporteur.  I know we have had a lot of discussion in the breakout groups.  I ask the speakers to send me key points from that.  And all the speakers have my email address.  I have been pinging them.  Other people, my details are on the ICC Web site.  You can find details of that on the IGF forum.  I would like to say as well we'll keep an eye about what tweets you guys have been doing as women and pull that into the workshop report.

>> ROBERT PEPPER:  Last two-points.  Great minds think alike.  The great minds in this room.  We came up with the three areas of capacity building for government, good policy, capacity building for people and good networks.

The Internet Society has a policy framework for enabling Internet access.  They have a wonderful Venn diagram.  That has three things:  Expanding infrastructure, support of governance, and fostering skills and entrepreneurship.  So maybe we just should have gone to Karen in the first place.  It is bottoms up, we ended up in the same place.  That's really great.

Last thing is, leading by example, right?  There has been a lot of discussion in this here, and on the importance in the main sessions and other working group sessions on the importance of gender equality in bringing women into the Internet Governance process and the technical process.  I'm honoured and proud to be on a panel where there's eight women and two men.  This is you actually great.  That led to the success of this session.

So if you can join me in thanking all of the speakers and all of the participants who were here.  Thank you very, very much.

(Applause.)

(The session concluded at 1:40 p.m. CST.)