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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>> MODERATOR: I'm Paul Mitchell and I'm your host for this afternoon and I hope we can have an active session. The Internet of Things is firmly entrenched in the vocabulary and we daily have new things joining the network, thermostat, baby monitors, delivery drones, traffic signals, television sets that listen to you, remote controls and the list is endless.
The question for our work today is how can these contribute to addressing the UN Sustainable Development Agenda and achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I suspect everybody in here is well aware of what the goals are, but just in case you aren't the SDGs are the successor to the millennium goals, the world's most complex challenges reduced to 17 goal with 169 measurable targets, no hunger, no poverty, gender equality, quality education, clean air and water, et cetera.
The Sustainable Development Agenda is the United Nations Member States agreement on priorities for development, and the goal of today's workshop is to highlight how the Internet of Things is already playing a key role in supporting local and global initiatives and at catalyzing inclusive and sustainable growth. Our panelists here will discuss policy options on how the global community can harness the Internet of Things to realize these goals and we will run this workshop in three parts.
So first we will hear about examples how IoT is or can be used to realize the goals from different perspectives along the panel, and then we will have some interactive Q and A from all of you. Next we will hear about the technologies and systems required to make it all work again followed by some questions and finally we will hear about the policy approaches and options that might apply to accelerate progress. I think we have a great panel of experts including in by remote which Gian here is going to help us with. Before we get started with the first panel I will start on my left and ask each panelist to introduce themselves starting with Jennifer and maybe two or three sentences about who you are and what you do.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: Hi, now you can hear me. My name is Jennifer Chung and I work for DOTAsia organisation. We are a Top Level Domain registry so it's DotAsia and I work for them in the capacity of Internet Governance. My official title with them really doesn't describe what I do, but I am the Director of corporate knowledge for them. So that's what I do. Thanks.
>> I'm Jackie Roth with Verizon communications we provide communication services, Internet services, Internet of Things in the U.S. and around the world outside the U.S. often enterprise services and I am with the international public policy group. (Jackie Ruff).
>> RICARDO PEDRAZA-BARRIOS: My name is Riccardo and I work for the Colombian regulatory commission which is the national body responsible for setting communications policy for the Government. I'm pleased to join this panel and looking forward to share some of our experiences. Thank you.
>> PETER MAJOR: Hi, I'm Peter Major. I Chaired the UN Commission of Science and Technology for Development. In fact, I think I am a substitute for the colleague who couldn't make it. I'm going to talk about the role of the CSC in my short intervention, but just to flag that we have two main mandates. One of the mandates is the over review of the WSIS process and the other mandate is the traditional science mandate of the CSC, but the two things are kind of converging and I was just happy to take up this road to drop in as a substitute. Thank you.
>> I work for the Internet Society the Asia‑Pacific office, and just a little bit about my organisation, the Internet Society is a global not‑for‑profit organisation so we work in the areas of Internet policy, Internet standards and Internet development.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Now, I will swing over to Gian and the first additional panelist I will let him introduce ourself and then begin, we will begin with sort of his intervention. So Gian? Over to you. To introduce our first remote participant.
>> So our first remote speaker is Paul Rowney from AFLCTA and he will be speaking remotely. Hello.
>> PAUL ROWNEY: Hello, can you hear me? My name is Paul Rowney I'm from the Africa ICT alliance, which is a private sector net alliance African Associations Corporations and Companies that is driving the acceleration of ICTs and development in Africa.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. And, Paul, while you have the floor, you actually get to start with your initial set of remarks and then we will move back to the rest of the panel.
>> PAUL ROWNEY: Okay. Thank you. I will start the process. The Internet of Things from an African context, what we are looking at here is there is a lot of talk about the Internet of Things, is Africa ready for the Internet of Things, is it a priority? Should our Government be looking at the Internet of Things as one of their top Agenda Items and will the regulators and bases in this process (Where). As we know a lot of the disconnected citizens in the world are in Africa.
When we talk about Connecting the Next Billion, a lot of them are here. Our Governments in Africa, they do recognize the Internet. There is a lot of talk on the continent about Internet as an enabler. It's in most of the national development plans now that ICT is one of the pillars for development at a regional level. We have a lot of talk on the political landscape about the Internet, but there is a lot of challenges as we know.
We are starting to connect citizens. Our mobile operators are driving mobile broadband mostly in the urban areas, but slowly into the rural areas. There is a lot of new technologies being adopted to address the digital divide, particularly technologies around the IM bands and Wi‑Fi and super Wi‑Fi such as TDY space. But still the majority of the citizens are not connected.
Now, when we start talking about the Internet of Things, predictability, reliability without good infrastructure, without good telecommunications, the Internet of Things becomes a bit more problematic. We, we are striving towards the basics of universal access. There is digital divides across the entire continent which we are failing to bridge. A lot of this is down to legislation regulation and, of course, lack of capacity where when we look at Internet of Things, it is an enabler for the continent to start to meet some of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The question is as posed here are we ready as a continent to bridge that gap? I think in general there are pockets in Africa like South Africa and others where infrastructure is stronger, but we have got countries where in the continent where electricity is off most of the time if it exists at all. And without electricity the Internet of Things tends not to work.
We have got a lot of countries where as I mentioned earlier, there isn't accessibility to connectivity and where there is connectivity, it tends to be poor, and it's not well supported. And then when we start looking at other issues around Internet Governance and around cybersecurity, these things are relatively new to the continent and we are still starting to develop our skills around those areas. So I'm saying right now that I'm not convinced that Africa is ready to reap the full benefits of the Internet of Things. I think it needs to be on the agenda. It is becoming on the agenda.
Governments are starting to understand the role that the Internet of Things of things can play on the continent, but I think we have a long, long way to go before it becomes reality, and become that enabler for social change that we are hoping it's going to be.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Now, I will switch to the first person on my level, Noelle to provide a little from a technical perspective, and just I will ask everybody in this room to apparently get very close to the mics because otherwise it's not working too well.
>> NOELLE FRANCESCA DE GUZMAN: Thank you, Paul. So I would like to share some of the things that are happening in Asia‑Pacific. I suppose it has a lot, the region is quite diverse, but it has especially the Developing Countries in the region have a lot of in common with what is happening in Africa, but we do see, you know, sensors and devices that are starting to be used for developmental context, but these are mainly sensor‑based. We are not talking about self‑driving tractors here for farming or, I don't know, even devices that have actuators or devices that can do, you know, physical things like open fences.
So, for instance, one of the projects that we are supporting through our community grants program is a maker space. This is in the Philippines where university students are now, they are currently trying to develop wireless detectors. So in the Philippines you have very densely populated areas including low income informal settlement areas that use liquefied petroleum gas, LPG for cooking.
Now, this is quite safe if you have, say, a smoke detector at home, but for many areas that are slum areas that are kind of makeshift materials and very, very close together, leakages have in the past led to whole areas being burnt down. So these sensors can be quite valuable to be able to alert residents that there is a leak.
Another example are in India, there is connected thermometers so these are in cold storage units so if you are delivering vaccines to rural villages and rural clinics, they try and monitor the temperature inside, also quite valuable when it comes to health. Another example I suppose is in Vietnam, so in Vietnam they are starting to use solar powered sensors to monitor changes in temperature, changes in weather, from soil moisture to wind speed as an early warning system to be able to alert citizens or communities if there is a higher risk of flash floods or landslides.
Another example in the area of disaster management this time in rescue and recovery and I'm trying to give examples on disaster risk management because Asia‑Pacific is the most disaster prone area or region in the world. And this one involves the use of mobile transponders so if an earthquake just happened and you are one of the victims trapped under the rubble, you can send signals, you can send messages that these mobile transponders that are going around can pick up, and they will relay it to the rescuers who will be able to know where you are.
So this, the last example relies on what we call delay tolerant networks and, Paul, correct me if I'm wrong, but these, they ‑‑ they store and they transmit data incrementally until it reaches its destination, and this is quite valuable when we are talking about areas with low or unreliable connectivity. And I guess this brings me to I suppose the first thing I would like to highlight is there is not a lot of clarity at the moment or it's in some cases it's actually quite restrictive with regards to the policies that would enable the use of IoT devices and sensors and systems to achieve development goals to enable this kind of experimentation to happen.
An example is TDY space so countries are deliberating and some of them have like Singapore has been quite advanced in it, but a lot of countries in a lot of countries it's difficult to implement these I suppose or experiment and implement these systems if there is not a lot of regulatory clarity or clarity when it comes to policy. The second thing that I would like to highlight is Governments, Developing Countries, they get very excited when it comes to using big data to solve development problems or, you know, problems that they are facing. But there is not a lot of discussion going on at the moment on what this means for user privacy and security.
So we need to able for data protection policies to be able to catch up with what is happening. On the user side, it's worth considering that when we talk about deploying Internet of Things to achieve SDGs is that we will be deploying them in areas that are quite resource poor. So this means, and obviously that have populations that either have yet to go on line or are just coming on line. So when we talk about digital literacy, for instance, we also need to consider how do we incorporate these principles of privacy and security into these programs that we have just to be able to ensure that, you know, the beneficiaries of using IoTs for SDGs would also be aware of what implications data sharing or data collection would have on their security and their privacy.
I would like to end my comments there.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, now, we are going to go back to our remote moderator, Gian and I believe we have Arial on line and you can introduce yourself first and give your intervention.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: My name is Ariel Balbosa I'm a colleague from Colombia, I work in Colnodo. It is a local organisation based in Bogota. We are working on the use of ICT for social Government. I don't know if it's time to share with all of you my idea, iOT FOE Internet Society or I have to wait. Hello.
>> MODERATOR: They are working on it.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: I was saying that Colnodo is a Civil Society organisation based in Colombia since 1994. We are working in the strategy of Internet and social development. Our cross cutting topics are gender, sustainable development and Free and Open Source Software. So it the sound is good?
>> MODERATOR: Yes.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: Okay. Colnodo are developed in sustainable development, poverty reduction. So the strategic use of ICTs – next.
>> MODERATOR: You are back. Okay. Keep going.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: Okay. Next please. Our vision of Internet of Things ‑‑ please one, please. Previous one, please. Previous one. We are a Civil Society organisation and our vision of Internet of Things is things and objectives will be active participates in information of social processes. We believe that these things, smart things and objects will be interacting and communicating among themselves and with the environment reacting alternatively to the real world created actions and created services with and without human intervention.
In this presentation I have two projects I want to share with you. Next. Next. The first one is a project called deplasma the detection of an environmental link to asthma. This was a project made in the (?) Spain it was made almost two years ago. Next. And the idea with this project was to create a real time air quality monitoring platform to avoid risk situations for people with asthma.
The solution that it creates aims to integrate monitoring and the communication of air sampling, data mining and (?) of environmental parameters. The main goal of the project was depending on the environmental analysis of the platform. The platform sends SMS to registered users with asthma. This is the first project. The second and last project I want to show is, next. This is a project we are now developing is the Internet of Things for (?). The idea is to implement it here in Colombia and it's called own it. It is focused on potato producers. Next.
The idea with this project is the use of drones to take produce and crops. The drones send their photos for chrome mat to analysis for a mini lab located in the same farm. And depending on the color in the picks a system will send water or nutrients to certain parts of the crop. Next. So this is going on, this is just two projects that we are now developing here in Colombia and I just wait for your comments and questions about it.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much for that. Now, we will go back over to the panel here at the front, and pass it to Peter if the UN perspective.
>> PETER MAJOR: Thank you, Paul, in your introductory remarks you mentioned the SDGs, the continuation of the MDGs, in fact we have two tracks. One track is really the continuation of MDGs, but the other track is the sustainability. This is a kind of older initiative of the UN. The overall approach of the SDGs ask to leave no one behind, and that is very important. It is important because we tend to forget about the human factor in the smaller IGF or IG environment, and we tend to regard only the technical part. And as we can just experience right now that the human factor is extremely important and we should concentrate on that as well.
Having said that, I just want to make some remarks about the mandate of the commission on sharing. I ought to mention it is the focal point for the WSIS follow‑up within the UN system, and the other task of the commission is to act as a Forum for the examination science and technology questions.
And I already spoke on one of the ‑‑ in one of the main sessions that to me science is not exclusive of the natural sciences or engineering, but also social sciences. So I will encourage my fellow Commissioners to concentrate on the human part as well. Getting back to the topic of this session, I would like to mention that the commission itself this year as usually it does, one of the priority themes which it treated was the digital force side and this is a part of the report of the Secretary‑General to the General Assembly of the UN.
And in this report, naturally we have extensively dealt with the issues of IoTs, big data and so on, so forth. And I really recommend you to go to the website of the CSCD where you can download the report of on the digital force side where we have really made an extensive survey of what is going on with real examples. I don't really want to quote here.
Now, as far as policy approaches are concerned, it has been already mentioned, I think, the white space has been mentioned which is also part of the management of the spectrum and this is an issue which will come up, I think, with IoTs as well and there is a big competition naturally for the spectrum itself. And white spaces may be used and it is, I think it's in the remit of the national administration that is for the spectrum managers of the national administrations, however, this is one aspect that should be kept in mind. The other aspect, I think, is the deployment of IPv6. And probably you may know that we are lagging behind with the deployment of IPv6 which is quite an issue and it should be dealt with.
I think I will be more ‑‑ we will go into details about these things probably in the third part of the session. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Just a quick summary of what we have heard so far. We have seen a couple, a few examples most recently the ones from Ariel on using IoT drones for agriculture as well as the environmental monitoring for Spain, both of those tie to agricultural goal, an environmental goal. Noel talked about IoT sensing devices in the detectors for LPG gas leakage, connected thermometers for in health context. So we have got, we have got clear connections between the applications of this technology here in the Noelle's examples.
In the African context Paul did a nice job of explaining what the challenges are and summarized it by saying he is not convinced that Africa is ready yet for a various right of reasons related to connectivity, lack of connectivity, lack of money, et cetera. And perhaps lack of capacity in Government.
At this point I would like to open it up for the next ten minutes or so for questions that you in the audience here or anybody who is participating remotely may have for any of the panelists who have spoken up to this point in time. So please don't be shy. Ask your questions. If not, then I will have to ask them questions. So I will go and ask Noelle a question because you have brought up several examples of real world applications of sensor technology. I wonder if you could talk about what you have seen so far as some of the obstacles to being able to bring those technologies into play to actually solve the problem.
>> NOELLE FRANCESCA DE GUZMAN: Thank you Paul. I think I already mentioned some of them, but I think that at the moment it's scalability and that has to do with the cost involved. I mean, from our perspective sensors, the cost of sensors, for instance, have fallen drastically, but if you are talking about low income communities being able to utilize them it may, I mean, $50 may be still very unaffordable, and then we also have as I mentioned there is granted that there is increasing coverage of, well, actually almost ubiquitous coverage of 2G and to a certain extent 3G as well, but not so much I suppose in rural areas and this is important because despite your rapid urbanization, you still have countries, especially countries in South Asia where the majority of the population still live in rural areas.
Another I suppose obstacle would be just, well, I don't know, where do I begin? I think I will end there. If anybody else wants to pitch in.
>> MODERATOR: Yes, Peter.
>> PETER MAJOR: Thank you. Maybe hearing my panelist colleagues the opportunities that they are seeing in different sectors, I want to just share some news I read this morning about the Mexican economy, and it really surprised me to learn that the income from agricultures in this country now surpass the income delivered from any other exportation or and even the tourism which are really, really big, but from now on, the Mexican economy is getting the biggest part of their GDP from agriculture exports.
So that makes me think really about the opportunities the Internet of Things could have in bringing the agriculture productivity in Mexico even more productive. So for many developing economies that usually have depended on oil minerals or tourism, this is a new opportunity with the Internet of Things to set or to align with a new sector that is more compatible with their capabilities. So I think that it is just one sector. I think it's, it is important to have in mind. And the other one is transportation, I believe.
Most of the developing economies doesn't have a modern public transportation system, and because it demands huge amounts of investment, and the economies has trouble with many other demands from their societies. Just bringing about some simple Internet of Things solutions on traffic management could really improve the quality of life of many of the citizens of these economies which are usually big cities.
So I believe these two sectors I would like to just say it has a huge potential especially for developing economies thank you.
>> MODERATOR: I wanted to come back to Paul if he is still on line. So the question for Paul in the African context, you identified a concern that Africa is not really ready. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you think the necessary levers are that the sort of multistakeholder global Internet community could pull to actually help facilitate Africa's readiness.
>> Thank you, Paul. I think a lot of our challenge, is one is lack of understanding, one is lack of capacity, and there is a lot of other priorities facing the continent. We look at connectivity, it doesn't mean our leaders want to connect citizens, they are also blocking Internet. We get Internet lockdowns, we are bringing in cyber laws that are impeding people's access. So I think from a continental perspective, we have got a long way to go.
One thing I wanted to add to that as well is that when we look at connectivity, I think connectivity is one of the keys to the success of the Internet of Things, particularly around sustainable development because we need to get these things out into the rural areas. In Namibia we ran you one of the largest TDY space trials very successfully, but our regulator is quite hostile towards TDY space. We are struggling to get regulation in place whereas this is an enabler and globally it's been shown to bring connectivity to rural areas.
Even this morning we had meetings with our regulator around type approvals. Now, when you look at the Internet of Things, that means bringing in new devices that are not necessarily type approved. We are going back five years in the way, how type approval was done. We are not taking supply declarations, pretty much everything now in Namibia has to be type approved. We have backlogs of six months. How do we start to bring in new technologies into the market?
We are blocking progress through regulation through policy, and we need to be breaking down those barriers to enable the Internet of Things. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. That's maybe a good jumping off point to move over to Jennifer now and let Jennifer provide her thoughts overall on the IoT and SDGs.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: Thank you, Paul. So I wanted to focus a little bit on fully, thinking a little bit about privacy because Noelle touched on it earlier when Developing Countries are really keen to use big data for IoT, but then there is questions surrounding data privacy, security and all of that. So how do we reconcile this? How do we mitigate this? One piece of this could be using DNS sec to address the security issues. If you build on trust, you need a trusted Internet. Trust requires both security and privacy, and this can be enforced by mass encryption.
What I mean by that is really not a bad sense. You have devices, you know, Internet of Things, devices can talk to other devices. This is why in this kind of environment you need two models. The model that people really do know about on Internet of Things is the Cloud model. So what that means is each device is connected to a Cloud. You have, you know, the data, you upload the data and it talks to your device and that's the big data model.
A second model that is kind of in development and we are in development with other partners is local within the devices so this is a local ecosystem, a local network and keeping that data and computing local. So why does this have to do with security and privacy? This gives the user, the user gets to consent whether or not his or her data gets used. The Cloud Computing model is a big data model. Now, consent could have been given before, but in this local network, local ecosystem model, every single time your data is accessed, you need to give consent.
So how does this kind of tie back in? Why is DNS sec important to mitigate this privacy issue here? Each device would have its own, for example, domain name, and it would be within the local network, it would use a DNS sec so the public key infrastructure, the public key and the private key would be used within the devices to connect to each other and that's how we could use DNS sec to realize, you know, to mitigate the security issues that is prevalent or is on a lot of people's minds when we talk about Internet of Things because back in September there was this big news Article or very big news that happened when people were like oh, no, you know, Internet of Things it was used it was hacked, now what are we going to do because it's in your own home. You are confused why these devices can be used to attack other things in a very big way.
This is for the very first time home user, like user's home networks have become an indispensable part of the global Internet infrastructure and I think I'll stop there and I can carry on with the policy implications in the third part.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. And I will turn next to Jackie.
>> JACKIE RUFF: Thank you. Well, I think this has been a great discussion so far and very, very much exhibit with the ideas that I was ‑‑ consistent with the ideas I was thinking about trying to come in and do a useful intervention here. I tried to think about examples of IoT that our company and others are doing that would be directly related to the goals, and so it was interesting that you raised the, Noelle, I think the vaccines because that is something, and even in the U.S. right now, we have recent legislation about being able to track the supply chain for medicines and pharmaceuticals to make sure that they are safe and that they are not counterfeit and so on.
And developing those uses of IoT could easily be applied in the developing world. The other one that I, of course, immediately comes to mind is the Smart Cities with all of the traffic management and so on and optimizing traffic flows. And then the third one, and this, I think, goes somewhat to what our colleague from Africa was speaking about, you know, I was asked to think about what would be a few necessary elements to make IoT succeed, and the first one that came to my mind was actually having expansive and reliable infrastructure.
That means different things in different markets, but clearly in some markets it means just the fundamentals of building the networks. In other markets it means taking the next generation, usually a wireless network, so in some cases we will be moving even to the fifth generation of wireless. In all cases, it requires, of course, spectrum investments, commitment by all players and expectation that different types of networks will be built in different situations.
So that would be my first element to say that we undeniably need. The second one and I think that's already come out in conversation is that we need to expect a wide range of uses. And there should be, therefore, a regulatory environment and I think we will come back to that later that is friendly to try different things, to have innovation so that type of flexibility.
And that looks at ways to simplify. I was very interested in the comment about sort of type standards that are being imposed because there are certain things like permitting or licensing or device registrations or mandates on which identifiers and numbers you can use that prevent having the wide range of uses as may be appropriate to the type of service or to the market. And then my third element and last would be that in so many ways the services that have been discussed and will be potential, we don't even know what they are, of course, but it's pretty safe to assume that in large part they need to be seamless across borders to at least have that potential.
And Cloud platforms may be appropriate in some cases. In other cases it may be more of a local type of arrangement, but you can see if you look at pandemics or a lot of healthcare issues, things like that that it really does have to go across borders. And we need to figure out the right policies on that. Right now we do see somewhat of a trend of localization requirements in creating barriers. Sometimes in the name of privacy and security. Totally agree we need to deal with privacy and security, but we need to be careful that it doesn't create a barrier to exactly the kinds of services that will be so important to achieve the SDGs and other objectives. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Now, I would like to turn it back to Jen and Ariel who is on the line.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: Hello? Can you hear me? I will just add something about the presentation about the importance to have a private network, private ecosystem. In the Colombia project that I already mentioned security was one of the first concerns of the potato producers. Those private networks must be a valid and proper solutions to implement Internet of Things. I think it's important this topic of privacy because from the first question for those was is it going to be located in the Cloud or what kind of Cloud or what is going to be the privacy condition of that? So I think you mentioned already the point about privacy and security of information, and this part of private Eco network would be a good option. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I would like to open the floor to anyone in the room or other remote participants that have questions. Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: List out what are some of the challenges at this stage and discuss solutions and policy terms because I don't believe there is anybody from Government here and I think that would be an important perspective and I could present that if that is agreeable.
>> MODERATOR: That would be appropriate.
>> AUDIENCE: Okay. Thank you. My name is Viad Peratti, MAG member and Chair the largest ICT committee of about 200 members in India which has a full range of industry partners and telecos too, search engines and everything. So we are dealing with this stuff firsthand, and you can take it that what I'm suggesting is roughly true for South Asia which is about 35% of the world population. My friend from Africa spoke about not being ready and that goes to the heart of the paradoxes that we have. Let me present three paradoxes so we can get a sense of where the developing world sits today.
I will take an example and you can expand that because it's a large example that can be used. On the list of connected citizens in the world of the 197 UN countries, India is the second with 350 million population connected. On the list of unconnected citizens of the UN 197 countries, it is number one with 900 million unconnected. So that is the level of the policy paradox that we are dealing with the basic thing called connectivity.
I will come down where M to M goes. Let me say another one. They put a spaceship on Mars at the fraction of the cost the United States did, one of the few countries that put an orbiter on Mars and there is a photograph of that, and yes, sir there are 400 million Indians who have yet to make their first phone call from their own phone, 400 million Indians have yet to make their first phone call from their own phone.
So when we talk about readiness as a nation, the Government is dealing with just a huge amount of things at hand. It could sort of go on about the paradoxes and it's an unending list, but let me just say here are the four or five things that the Government are looking at. I will present their perspective because we deal with them every day on these issues as an industry representation. First, they are looking at machine to machine and IoT as an extension of telecommunications. So their starting point is telecom is regulated, how do we regulate IoT? So all of these fantastic examples I have heard of, that's because the Government hasn't gotten its teeth in it yet.
They are looking at this as oh, my God, there is something going on and it sounds like telecom. We have to do regulation now. So keep that in mind as we look at this. The second point I want to say is that security is a huge aspect. I think she spoke about it. It's an incredible aspect especially in South Asia which is terror prone and because human intelligence is down and digital intelligence is up they are depending on digital intelligence and IoT is right in the middle of national security. So the guys dealing with this are intelligence agencies, not the police force.
So that's where decisions are being made about issues of privacy, surveillance and all of the stuff that IoT is concerned with. And there are two more things and then I will sort of rest it. This is just the problem definitions and we can talk about solutions. The users of IoT as has been defined are various ministries, Government departments, rural development, women and child, sanitation. As you know there are more phones in the world than people have access to drinking water or sanitation put together. So that's the stage.
But none of those ministries are discussing IoT regulation which has been planned in an office in some department of telecommunications or department of Internet, whatever the Government set up is. There isn't anything wrong with it, but this is just the reality of what's going on. So the users are somewhere else, and the regulators are somewhere else. They think this is a telecom thing we need to regulate.
I will close by saying unless we can invest very quickly into getting the regulatory piece right, we could be in for a very long delay. I will close with the last example. We took ten years to go from 1 to 24 million mobile phones. After the regulation was established and the use case came in, we went to a billion phones in the next ten years, 24 million in 10 years and a bill none in the next 10. So we don't want to get stuck with IoT in the same situation where the growth is so small that the innovation starts hurting.
Very last thing, technology will find its way. I mean, there are brilliant technologies and use cases sitting all over the world. They will invent stuff to find every solution to every big problem in the world. The real issue is to make sure that the hands are freed and this can actually go and deliver to its full potential so I am saying this because I don't see a Government representation of this and their perspective is very different from what we are bringing to the table.
Thank you.
>> CHAIR: I was going to hand it over to Peter who probably is the closest to Government.
>> PETER MAJOR: I change my hat and want to talk about regulations from the ITU point of view. It was interesting to listen to some delegates who brought up the issue of Wi‑Fi causing harmful interference to hearing aids machines. Persons with hearing impairments had problems of interference. Basically they couldn't use the devices in a Wi‑Fi environment. Now, I'm afraid the regulations will not come immediately. The result that was achieved in the radio assembly of 2015 last year was to give instructions to one of the Study Groups in the ITU to look into this mat every which means that we will come up with recommendations by 2019 and I'm not sure whether the radio Conference of the ITU will take up this issue because it is not on their agenda.
So it means the discussion about regulations on a global level and which we will go down to the national level will come earliest in 2022 so it means that we have seven, and this is a very optimistic estimate so this is a major obstacle in addition but has been mentioned including electricity which is, of course, I have been to (?) just three weeks ago was an issue even in a village where it is, I have seen a school with computers and interesting laptops and when we asked why laptops we were told because of the electricity.
So they didn't want to rely on unreliable supply. And laptops are ideal for these purposes.
>> MODERATOR: Pedro, go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, Ricardo from the Colombian Government. So, yes, there is a representative from the Government perspective. More specifically from the regulator, the communication regulator and not the telecommunication, and I agree with you and with Paul from Africa the digital divide is undeniable. It's undeniable reality in most of the developing economies. And I believe you mentioned one in your exposition you mentioned one of the key elements is the mindset of the Government.
And that's maybe the first step to try to change from the telecommunications mindset to the communications or to the ICT sector. And I believe that that has been our reality moving from telecom, Ministry of Telecommunication to a Ministry of ICT and the regulatory bodies, telecommunication regulatory body to a communications body with a mindset of trying to foster and promote ICT sector, not with the idea of regulating in terms of forbidding or limiting or trying to tax initiatives that go beyond the telecommunication side, but instead to try to develop policy and promote programs, initiatives that could help the private sector, the society, the full Government to embrace the ICT opportunities.
It's a long path. It's not from one day to the other, but I believe it's the beginning of a possible solution. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Andrew.
>> ANDREW MACK: Thank you. Andrew Mack not from the Government, from private sector. We have a firm that works a lot with the Global South. One of the things that I think is really interesting about this conversation and a lot of the conversation when it references the Global South is we have a tendency to think of the Global South as being behind in this discussion, and more of a taker. I would like to suggest that we flip that.
When we are thinking about the SDGs, SDG17 is about partnerships and there are substantial possibilities for partnerships with the private sector on this. And then there is SDG number 8 which is about building the economy and building jobs which is a major, major issue in the global south as well.
I would like, I would like to suggest that we might want to look at the Global South as being a data super power, a future data super power because of the seven or eight billion people on the planet. Very little is known about an awful lot of them who live in the Global South and that should provide a lot of opportunities that that could be unlocked by IoT. I think it's a big opportunity and one that could conceivably bring a lot of jobs and a lot of resources to the Global South.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. And we have Paul also on line with Gian.
>> ONLINE MODERATOR: So Paul has a question for Peter. Is there a reason that the ITU is relatively quiet on the issue of TD wide space in the broadcast bands?
>> AUDIENCE: It's easy and not easy probably. ITU regards it as a national and a local issue and ITU is involved I think in the global regulations and that is the short and long answer.
>> AUDIENCE: Just to be specific there is a footnote that says national administrations are free to do it that there is not a problem with the existing regulation. And ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Yannis. I work for Network Information Centre in Brazil. I would like to add my two cents to this whole discussion, and also probably I will follow Peter Major's line when he said think about the human in this whole thing, you know. My point is that you are not talking or very little has been talking about the interface in IoT things. A lot have been talked about the devices connected divides and about life, but the interface is the way that people will interact with the device. So we have to talk more about this interface.
From one side you have to talk about the standardization of interface. In the other side we have two talk about usability of interface. So that's the way that people can interact and also take decisions on how the device can work or in their favor or can just say, well, stop being connected because I don't want this device to connect. So the interface is very important. I know that the organisation ‑‑ the privacy organisations think about that and they call it the Web of things but that is not enough. We have to talk more about that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much and we will turn back to Paul or someone else. This is Ariel again.
>> ARIEL BARBOSA: Okay. I would like to add about the IoT policy. It's really important to promote Civil Society participation in the laws and regulation. For instance, and this is not only in Colombia but in many countries of the world where users are starting to use part of the spectrum for wireless rural networks bought I think we are too late because the current regulation did not take into account the alternative uses of spectrum. So now we have opportunity as Civil Society to participate in the constriction of IoT regulations. Civil Society must be involved from the beginning.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks very much for that. I would like to go to Jackie, and, and you are passing to Edmund.
>> JACKIE RUFF: My comment is on discussion on regulatory policy ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE: I wanted to have a brief response to the interface. I think that's a great topic. I think that is definitely one area that is missing in a lot of the discussion. And the reason why I think that's important is as mentioned, I think my colleague, Jen, mentioned that the first time we in the home have these devices that form a critical part of the Internet infrastructure, so users need to, well, for the last 20 odd years the computing industry has moved towards what is called simplification and believing that users are pretty dumb.
Well, I think users are starting to become a little more sophisticated over time, and it's important that those interfaces allow users to stop things or control them and configure them more intelligently and control it. Because things that come out of a box and doesn't allow you to do anything about it actually are vulnerabilities because things change on the Internet so fast. The user can't stop it, then it becomes a problem.
Of course, there needs to be a balance. I mean, there are more sophisticated uses and there are less sophisticated uses but the interface needs to be able to, you know, those advance buttons and stuff needs to be in there, and that needs to be part of the standard, I think. That's a very important part of what we call security and privacy into the future, I think.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, now, I think we are firmly in the time slot for the regulatory stuff and I want to get to Jackie because Verizon is one of the sort of global leaders in innovating on delivering services on networks, on security, on a whole host of things and having to navigate the world of sometimes conflicting Government regulations in different parts. So I'm very interested in your view on sort of what's it going to take to put all of the incentives in place to make this come to life everywhere?
>> JACKIE RUFF: That sounds like a very ambitious deliverable, but I do want to talk just about some of the trends that we are seeing around the world. So I appreciate what Verat said and what Mr. Pelazzo said, and we are seeing, and I noticed the comment from the colleague from Brazil. So we have been seeing countries really looking at these issues. Some of that was expressed in the ITU initiative.
And probably in many cases the first instinct is to say, okay, how do I do something like a traditional telecom law that's labeled IoT? And we saw that a couple of years ago early on, and so you might see something like new licenses, registering every device possible, maybe even looking at rates and charging arrangements and so on.
I believe that it's probably safe to say that some of that has now been seep to be unhelpful, unnecessary, possibly imposing barriers. So there is, I hope, a little bit more of a view that a lot of the policies we need for IoT we have in existence for other types of services. So that the best approach is to really try to figure out what's the maximum that could be done with something particularly if you can call it an ICT service or a communication service? How far can you get with what's already there? What barriers might need to be removed? What are the gaps? And maybe those gaps are quite narrow and maybe they are more about sector specific, right, than about IoT, per se?
So I would say that that is sort of a constructive direction, and that in that analysis it's very important to have multistakeholder input, and that we are seeing that in countries, and even in the U.S. which is, of course, not a developing country but nonetheless relevant our agency that coordinates policy for the Government on communications generally has launched a consultation very open come tell us what you think the issues are, not with the assumption that we will do regulations, but that we can try to figure out what are good enabling policies.
Because I do think in this area it's so innovative that it's not well designed for an expectation of intrusive classic regulation. So need to deal with the issues, need to deal with the people factor, but those are just some overview remarks. Thanks.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I want to swing back to Jennifer and, you know, this past couple of years we have seen the largest expansion of the Domain Name System with a huge number of new Top Level Domains including internationalized domain names which might get a little part of some discussion interface and acceptance, but I am wondering from the perspective of someone involved in the expanded domain name world, what are some of the challenges that you see in terms of operating, managing security, and fitting into the sort of global ecosystem of domains?
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: So I think I just also want to jump off of what Jackie did mention before there is infrastructure in place. There is legislation and there is already regulation in place to address a lot of these concerns. And there is some music too. Music is the spice of life ‑‑ that can address these things and when we are looking at expanded Top Level Domain space, when we are looking at things like IoT we have to remember that sometimes policy priorities for the Global South are different than policy priorities for the Global North, and going back to the SDGs insuring that no one is left behind does mean you have to level the playing field.
When you look at, for example, the SDGs quote, unquote, to help the developing economies, having policies that, you know, can possibly be more inducive to localized or local startups or local technologies and that kind of sense makes more sense than to give perhaps an advantage to establish companies or established providers or established services that already exist. Going back to the expanded DNS and expanded Top Level Domains, that pretty much does come back to consumer choice.
And having that, and having that as innovation, I think that is extremely important because it comes back to, you know, the individual having no one left behind. You have a choice to do this. Going back to IoT, for example, the privacy issues, you have a choice whether or not to consent to your data being used, you know, different from, you know, big data, you already, the data is already being used without your consent, without your knowledge and that's going to be a very big issue. So that is why SDGs, sustainable development of the technology, of the DNS is really important when it comes to thinking about policy development.
>> MODERATOR: And coming back to Noelle and then we will open it up for the balance to the folks in the room. So you happen to be in Singapore which has a fairly modern regulator, an integrated regulator in terms of the info com development authority. I wonder if you could share your thoughts on how the process in Singapore has worked in terms of enabling sort of the, pretty much the complete wiring of the entire country in a way that's very far ahead of many others.
>> NOELLE FRANCESCA DE GUZMAN: I would have to make a disclaimer, I'm not based in Singapore. I'm based in Manila.
The office is in Singapore though so I report to the Singapore office, but I will try and say something as well. So Singapore is in a very unique position because I suppose especially in Southeast Asia because it's an industrialized, it's an advanced economy. It also has a very, very good I suppose they have a very good system in place for Governments so they are very ‑‑ if you want political will power, then Singapore is the best case example that you could have in Southeast Asia.
They get things done pretty much. And when it comes to connectivity, it's just they have, they had an objective to connect, I don't know, I think at the moment it's about 96 or 98% of the population is connected in some form to the Internet. So they are now, what they have done most recently is that they, they have actually done a number of countries in the Global North have done, like the U.K., they have merged the media regulator with the information and the, well, the ICT regulator with the media regulator and it's now called IMDA.
And I suppose it's a way for them to be able to deal with all of these kind of cross‑cutting issues. And Singapore is also, they are advancing very rapidly. They are now testing in terms of IoT, I wouldn't say for SDGs because they are quite developed, but they are now, they are now talking about connected homes. They are talking about, I think they are going to pilot connected cars and having, having monitors for the elderly.
So I guess at the very basic level it just comes, comes down to political will power. So they know what they want, and they know how to get it done.
>> MODERATOR: Thoughts in the room? Verat.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, since I stirred the pot with the biggest problem, let me try and offer some thoughts on what the solutions could be here. I work for AT&T so I will present that point of view. First, I want to talk about Global South is being spoken about but let's talk about Developing Countries. I want to submit that I think we should be very comfortable with the fact that the Developing Countries would come up with the best technological solutions with the worst challenges we have to address the issues of SDGs. They are innovating at speeds we can't even imagine.
And to solve the problems of the poor, because as you know, the vast majority of the money and the research goes to solve the problems of the rich. This sector is going to solve the problems of the poor. So we can be happy about that, and you can take it that they are developing technology at a pace you cannot imagine so that will come through. We are confident about that.
I also want to commend the Government of India which is not in this room who have been consulting for the first time in ways that they have never done with people outside the telecom sector so the first time in 70 years we have seen car manufacturers in the department of telecom saying what are you doing here when there is IoT discussion going on. And logistics companies so consult, consult, consult. That is something the Government can do.
So here are some of my offerings very quick on what could be recommendations. I also want to plug in for the organizers of this session, ICC has this book and Page 4 has specific recommendations for policy makers, some really good ones. Here the ones that I would like to continue with, one, IoT sector needs to work with legacy networks.
If there is this expectation that some brand new networks will come along. That will take a long time. 95% of the population is still covered on 2G. So we would have to find ways in policy to work with legacy networks which is billions and billions of dollars. Second, at additional spectrum needs to be allocated. That discussion needs to occur early. However, the spectrum is, whatever ITU has, whatever any other body has that discussion needs to come fairly quickly.
Build a broad ecosystem for startups and incubators. They will drive the use cases so if there can be policies which help these kinds of things coming out, even low tech users that will help the developing world. Promote data centers. Large ‑‑ unless large number of data centers are promoted the data will become useless. Other ways it's just data flowing out which is just wasted.
Two more, interoperability standards being spoken about telecommunications is basically a local business that has some international calls and some interconnectivity issues. IoT starts globally. And local use cases are important, but it is inherently a global business, so that mindset needs to change. It has to be interoperable across world. Everybody needs to work with everybody and that includes multi‑stakeholderism and the last one, point that Jim spoke about, trust.
It's a huge issue. We need to resolve that, not leave it to the end because it will come to bite us. National security is an issue, privacy is an issue, network security is an issue. These need to be addressed right up front and very quickly. Otherwise they can significantly delay the rollout of IoT in the world as we hope it will. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Anyone else have a question in the room? Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: Just to say who I am, Desiree Losovich I'm an organizer of hack‑a‑thons in southeastern Europe. And this year I will be organising I think probably the third one. And I think we have not mentioned, I think, really the impact that these events have to build community, to really get and adopt goals that are a part of how we are going to transform the world. They are going to improve not just knowledge in these parts but there are a lot of communities. There is probably a hack‑a‑thon, an IoT hack‑a‑thon taking place every week somewhere in the world, and these communities are somehow disconnected from the regulators and from the private sector who sometimes funds them, but I do think that this community is growing very fast, and there are a lot of bridges that need to be built in order to really harness the potential of the community.
I think there is a lot of problems we are solving and there is a lack of communication about availability of the free spectrum and how the IoT is going to be used. So I think if we could really try and utilize these events that are already taking place at every ITF, even ICANN recently had a hack‑a‑thon they sponsored in India where I met a lot of really good developers from universities that come up with these new ideas and you have been mentioning. It's really fascinating and energizing what's going on.
And it would be good to really bring next time some of the practitioners to really hear from them how passionate they are. But the reason I think we have a lot of issues that we need to overcome such as vendors and the devices of not mentioning just the security of those, many of these devices coming with vendors lock in default pass words and we discussed this at the recent IoT workshop at the ITF. This is something the regulators could take home because unless you can change the password of this device we are going to have the Internet of broken things, and that's where the accent should be. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. So we just have a few minutes left, so I'm going to give each of the panelists who have participated today the opportunity to have more or less the last word. And we will start all the way to my left, and just come down this way. And in a minute or less your final thoughts.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: We have heard a lot from the panelists in the room and all of the concern about IoT and how it relates to the SDGs. It does cut across all of the SDGs because it's part of individual life and globally. You have networks of things, you have networks of people and you never have to forget the human element of having, insuring that no one is left behind. I know we have talked about the Global South and the Global North and all of the policies and regulations that are needed for that, but what is really important is faux not to stifle innovation and innovation local and personal and that kind of solution to address local problems. And that's pretty much my last take away for this.
>> JACKIE RUFF: I think this conversation has demonstrated the positive potential for IoT. I hope as one who works on public policy and regulations, I hope that we also come away with a sense that we don't need a heavy regulatory hand. We don't need things for IoT specifically if we have the right tools already in place, and that there is a, you know, so much tremendous potential ahead if it's done right. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: There is a CDG is a set of goals extremely challenging especially for developing economies. Paul from Africa, Varat and many other interventions have said the digital divide is a clear reality for many of these economies. Most of the unconnected users come from these developing economies. And the efforts that have been deployed by Governments is still huge and the Government is struggling to try to connect all of the remaining users, Internet unconnected users.
Nevertheless, the Colombian Government believes that the IoT represents an opportunity, and an opportunity that I forgot to mention that our local people develop solutions for our poor people who are the ones who are really needing. And that makes, that brings out the responsibility to capacity building program on network people to develop, to identify these opportunities, and to develop and to use it.
So it's a huge challenge and but it's a clear path on believing that our citizens can solve our problems. Thank you.
>> PETER MAJOR: What I heard today is that IoTs are in all of the SDGs either directly or indirectly. I don't agree with that. I heard two important remarks concerning regulations from Varat we heard that IoTs are being considered as a national security issue, and there was a call for regulation that is to move from telecom regulations to ICT regulations. I am not very much fond of regulations, I have to admit.
And how ‑‑ I'm a bit pessimistic that regulations will come and it will have an effect on the smaller community of the IGF and the Internet Governance, and it might change also the approach we have that is the multistakeholder approach, but I hope it is not going to happen. So I will do all that I can not to have it happen, but we will see.
>> NOELLE FRANCESCA DE GUZMAN: What we talked a lot about today proprietary standards and a lot of things but I suppose what hasn't been brought up is really what kind of IoTs can we deploy with the resources that we have in these communities, which would bring me to my next point is that they need to be simple. We need to start simple. And they need to be low cost. And that would mean having policy in place that would have bottom up innovation. Innovation from communities themselves. We can't rely on donors giving us things and hoping that when it breaks down some technical expert will come in and repair it. Communities need to be able to do this by themselves, and we need to be able to help them do that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, and is Ariel or Paul. Okay. In that case, then we are exactly at time. I just want to follow my list first and then ‑‑ I need to make a plug for a workshop that is in this room tomorrow at 3:00 which is on Internet of Things for sustainable growth which you like this room which doesn't have too much external noise and has natural light, 3:00, this is the place, this is the place to be.
Okay. Very quick.
>> AUDIENCE: Very briefly, there is a good reference resource published from ITU with regard to the relationship between the IoT and SDG. It's called Harnessing IoT for Global Development, and in that resource there is a query identified 12 out of 17 SDGs, IoT will play a critical role so in case you have not had a chance to have a look at that resource, I thought I would just point it out.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I would like to thank all of the panelists. My personal take away from this is that there is an abundance of opportunity in the IoT generally, and it's sort of ours to turn into an opportunity which is Andrew's perspective, and we should get out of here and actually go do it. So with that, we are at time. I would like to thank you all for taking your afternoon and I wish you well.
(Concluded at 1800).