The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the virtual Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), from 2 to 17 November 2020. 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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>> If you want to use slides, that's okay. My suggestion is it's better to have a conversation but, if you want to show some graphics or that's also possible. Share directly from your screen. Monica should be joining.
(Speaking language other than English)
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you for joining us. Good morning from Buenos Aires, very early. Nice spring day, looking at sunshine, starting to shine this morning. Thank you for being with us, this is a workshop 323, emerging perspectives on Internet exchange points. And I want to thank my dear friend Patricia Vargas from Peru that she invited me to moderate this session and she had an interesting idea to organize this exchange of ideas. Space in the Internet infrastructure.
So good morning, everyone. And briefly, remember that these are infrastructures and Internet packets and Internet service providers and connected international and national networks and support the proper functioning of the Internet protocol. And we'll try to cover discussions and exchanges of ideas from members of academia, private sector and civil society and governments and review the presentation of IXPs mainly three contexts. Current status in the international realm. How many are there and the relevance of the different IXPs. The sponsor when nation states face and Internet kill switch or shutdown for the entire Internet. And significance of the space in context of natural disasters. What does it mean to have a good IXP server just for you to know. My country Argentina has been one of the pioneers in Latin America and we have many. We have the most southern IXP in the world which is located in the City of ‑‑ which is the southern province of Argentina.
So for my country which is very big and the population is very not well distributed, IXPs have become a relevant part of the infrastructure. So we have some questions but before going to the questions themselves I would like to introduce them. Our distinguished panelists in this workshop. Ms. Patricia Vargas represents civil society from Peru in Latin America and she's currently a post doctorate at Fletcher School and she's also a fellow at the information society project ISP from Yale Law School. She has conducted diverse research projects related to different layers of the Internet infrastructure and she organized the workshop and invited me to be the moderator.
Jane Coffin is technical community and represents technical communities from the United States. And she's senior vice president for Internet growth at Internet Society, ISOC. She's responsible for the Internet growth project teams focus on community knit works, Internet exchange points and interconnection period and community development and critical project on measuring the health of the Internet.
Mr. Che‑hoo Cheng is infrastructure and development director of APNIC, registry of the Asia Pacific region. And he's responsible for training, technical assistance, security and technical community support and before that he was in charge of the Hong Kong Internet exchange.
And Mr. Moctar Yedaly is director and head of information society division at African Union.
And Ms. Nurani Nimpuno leaves in Sweden, Europe, I don't know now and head of WEOG, one of the largest Internet exchange points connecting 1,000 networks from over 80 countries around the globe. Nurani is also the coordinating IP in Europe and beyond. As you can see, we have a very interesting group of experts. Very experienced in the issue of IXPs. So with that, Patricia, do you have any comments so far so we can go to some ‑‑ I have prepared questions for our panelists. So the idea is to make the questions they can answer and then we can exchange some comments among yourselves and take questions from the audience. Patricia, is that okay?
>> Yes.
>> Okay.
Any other comments from colleagues? I' m not so good at talking and looking at the chat. I'm look at the chat now. Thank you very much. Do we have Jane as well? Okay no problem. Patricia, I have been checking you have an interesting paper about IXPs and it caught my attention that it's so detailed and thinking that you have been involved in this research about IXPs, which are your main findings as outcome nowadays. We all know about IXPs what's their role. But what's the latest news that you can give us about IXPs?
>> PATRICIA VARGAS: Hello, everyone. Thank you for the introduction, Olga and thank you for joining us here at the IGF. I'm going to start my presentation with a brief explanation about IXPs because I think it's important. As you just mentioned, IXPs are a physical infrastructure that allow multiple networks that form the Internet to connect directly. I refer mostly to IXPs but also can be content delivering. Such activity of interconnecting is known as the bidding process. Subject to private contract on economic arrangements.
This means of course that this is marked by a business relationship where one or more ISPs mostly sells connectivity to the global Internet. An important point is that IXPs decide they're located mostly nation states of advanced economies where there is strong resilience in infrastructures. Such condition the Internet traffic that comes from the develop world where there are no IXPs or less IXPs takes longer time and is subject to more expensive contractual arrangements. In terms of local traffic it's important to explain that the more the country has the quality and speed of the Internet service to enter increases and connection with global Internet improves.
This function is vital in terms of presence. I will refer to two specific scenarios my research has covered so far. One is something called famously called the Internet kill switch or the Internet shutdown of the entire Internet. I want to be precise and clear here. I am not going to talk about episode of censorship. I am just talking about the shutdown of the entire Internet. In this case controlling the Internet exchange points also known as IXPs seems to be the most logical step, most logical thing to control after the Internet service providers, however, controlling IXPs is not as easy as controlling Internet service providers. IXPs as I just mentioned, allow multiple network to connect. Within a nation state makes it more difficult to interrupt the traffic and more difficult to stop the connectivity.
This is one of the most important and critical differences between the policies where they change points and Democratic and non‑democratic regimes have ‑‑ when it comes to the alarms really not the legal framework the main difference. Democratic regimes such as U.S, US and Australia have multiple privately owned with multinational corporations and are not subject to government control. There is a robust network. In the case of non‑democratic regimes there are usually no IXPs or there are not enough IXPs to serve Internet service providers and all of them are under government control.
The second scenario I would prefer is a global pandemic. As we all know since March 2020 because of the crisis created by COVID‑19, the Internet societies reported up to a 40% increase in the global Internet traffic.
This means that exchange points at the global level suffer a significant change specifically in Greece. Though some emergency measures were necessary especially in the world, IXPs are proved to be resilient and adapted to the new needs of the industry and the human as they were able to process the high volumes of Internet traffic lockdowns produce. In this regard, IXPs prove to be fundamental element for resilience of Internet and critical times.
Now this caught my attention because there is a critical issue on the table to discuss. Because of the importance in the global Internet traffic, the technical community has paid a lot of attention to the IXPs. However, this is not the case for the legal arm policy communities.
Differently for example, from the ‑‑ other elements that support the proper functioning of the Internet protocol, the IXPs lack common international grounds for their protection. And they are only subject to the private and government operators in arrangements.
That being said, I want to be clear, I'm not advocating to sign to ratify a treaty regarding the Internet of exchange points. That's probably impossible.
What I'm suggesting that legal community should discuss is to find principles already grounded in the international domain that can help us to protect the IXPs and at the same time to protect the global Internet traffic.
>> OLGA: Thank you. The sun is shining in my eyes. Maybe there are a list of best practices or desired elements or rules that we may have for IXPs and I leave the comment to maybe to you and to other panelists when the time comes to exchange comments. And I have also seen countries where there's no IXPs, not under special government regimes but perhaps related with lack of competition. I have seen that in the region. So that's just adding your interesting comments to some new ideas. So I will give the floor now to Che‑Hoo Cheng. Did I pronounce it right? Thank you so much. I have a question. So regional Internet registries for those of you not familiar with the infrastructure there's relevant organizations related to Internet. They manage part of the critical Internet resources as IP addresses and ISP numbers and other very important things for the Internet infrastructure.
So Che‑hoo, as per your experience in APNIC and Hong Kong Internet exchange point, how would you describe the role of regional Internet registries in relation with creation of IXPs?
>> CHE‑HOO CHENG: Thank you for giving me opportunity to attend this significance. This is my first IGF session. Thank you for inviting me. Can I share my screen? Can you see my screen?
>> Yes, you can go to presentation mode if you want.
>> CHE‑HOO CHENG: I'm infrastructure and development director of APNIC. APNIC is one of the five regional registries providing IP addresses allocation service for the whole world, and APNIC is in charge of Asia Pacific region. Most RIRs have development especially for helping those developing countries. You should know including IXPs need globally unique IP addresses. So they're all our direct or indirect members, and that's why we have a role to play to help the development of IXPs in our relevant regions. We strongly believe IXPs can help Internet development in relevant countries and economies and can benefit members by facilitating easier connections among networks, keeping local traffic local and providing fast Internet connectivity to Internet users. We develop more IXP development work in developing countries economies as they need our help and support more.
In those countries economies some of them do not have any IXP at all. Some of them have IXP, but they're not functioning well so they need our help and support. And our primary support work is training and technical assistance. And our training and technical assistance is not just for IXP operators but also IXP so they can make best use of the IXPs established. They can also help talk to major stakeholders and convince them of the benefits of having a local IXP while we try our best. So far, we have been supporting IXP development Fiji, Papua, Mongolia, Pakistan, Thailand, India and others and support other economies where we need it.
Besides training and technical assistance on case‑by‑case basis, this may also provide a next Ethernet switch, the key equipment for running IXP. And for better DNS performance we report root server any cast instance and we may also support route server and for better routing security we'll have with TPTI the department and also the IPv6 deployment. We also help partners, members to install software to better manage their ISP operations. And we will recommend all the ISP to join API and members for industry‑best practices. Similar to UIX is the IXP industry. Also manners would be for better security, better practices.
in order to enjoy the ministry, we provide help and support to the industry association. Asia and forums hosted by not for profit IXPs so your people can negotiate more easily at the events as well as the NOCs which IXP supports.
As for IXP, we sponsor them. It's software open source. It's being used by almost 100 IXPs around the world. Very good tool. And we also sponsor a database for all networks on Internet to facilitate easier contact for your Internet connections and also IXDB which is for the IXP to maintain their information and these will help IXP operations. And that's why we provide sponsorship for them. I think I'll stop now and pass back to Olga.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you. That was very interesting, especially emphasizing the role of Internet registries and associations. For example, in Latin America we have thousands of small Internet service providers and that's the best place for them to connect through Internet exchange. So that is a very good thing to do for them.
We'll go now to Jane. I see her with a nice mask. Hello, Jane. How are you? Hope you're doing well and I have a question for you. Jane, your role in ISOC has been interesting for the installation of IXPs all over the world., , Which are main barriers you've found in this development and creation of IXPs based on your experience
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you, Olga. I'm sorry to be late. I've had technical difficulties. I'm in a public space in my building and I'm using public wi‑fi. Thank goodness. Difficulties we've seen are often the human difficulties. We say that developing an IXP is the human engineering versus technical the associations around the world. Many colleagues on the call here like Nurani here from Linx where we work with people hand in hand to convince policy makers and others in the local environment including some of the countries where you do have incumbents that have very powerful don't want to see an Internet exchange point come in because it helps level the playing field and bringing in a platform for the smallest ISPs as you described. Smaller ISPs can come together in a neutral way at one switching facility at the switch with switching to exchange traffic. Some of the biggest difficulties have been just the newness of an IXP and the local environment and people not understanding 100% how it works. It's trying to also get the human resources so we have to do a lot of coop STI building and training, so it's people who help run those IXPs and then often after that it can be equipment. We've had equipment at borders for months. Due to high duties or tariffs and getting that equipment into the country is difficult due to regimes that are set up for customs duties and will often say you're keeping your IXP in jail sometimes it can be the local human capacity at the technical side which organizations like ours and working hand in hand with folks like Che‑hoo we've gone in to train people and old existing rules that were meant to help collect duties and the new switches and other gear gets stuck at the border. Sometimes it's newness and how do we want to go through change and sometimes the human engineering that is more difficult than the technical.
>> That's interesting to know. Other soft barriers imposed by competition and maybe rules ‑‑ that's interesting what you say about equipment. Sometimes there is willingness, but it's impossible to bring the equipment in the ‑‑ in the country.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much, Jane. We will come back to you with more comments and questions in a moment.
I will go now to Moctar from the African region. How do you see the situation in the African region? What are the main changes for IXPs in Africa? We know for developing regions like Africa, Latin America, they have become a part of the infrastructure to lower prices for end user. So can you share your comments and experience with us?
>> MOCTAR YEDALY: Thank you very much. It's been a while since I met you and hello to everybody and Jane. How are you? And it's really hard to follow what was said before me from previous speakers. However, I'd like to share experience from Africa point of view and also comment on a few things that's been raised by both Patricia and Jane regarding the challenge with Jane. From Africa region 7 years ago we needed that there was no systems and in Africa be it at a regional level and that has been actually very good ‑‑ actually substance barrier that Africa we're meeting in terms of accessibility to Internet affordability and inclusiveness.
Since most of Africa and countries even within the same country in order to communicate you need to go back outside the continent and come back in general in the connectivity. So we decided to create from an African point of view, main objective is to unite the African countries and, therefore, to make sure that the traffic among the countries or between the countries is transparent and direct. So we set up a project called access, the point systems and we had ISOC to be our partner. They have contributed substantially and we have contact with them and we decided that among the 33 non‑operational point systems in Africa to enhance them and also make them operational. So we built capacity building for the, first of all, in terms of how to separate ecosystems among the point system and technical skills and provide them with equipment. So we started that. But this challenge is one we did one of that is how to make it operational and part of it is human engineering.
In fact, people still don't understand the interest. Although we have made a test on the impact and we have seen $2 million in terms of it and we decreased that in Gambia by 25%. So the viability of having a point at the international level is extremely vital. After that the Africa has a specific set because most of the operators are ‑‑ and you see in one country operators from foreign years and business imperative. In the center most of the time to have it happening back in their countries and healthcares rather than having that happen. Traffic is local. That means they aren't getting a lot of money. A lot of investment on what they're doing. And hence, that operationalization of those points we have set up still as biggest challenge, having those stakeholders together at the national level is still yet waiting to be really within the African countries. African Union in collaboration with ISOC we dare for the first time to do training on Internet shutdowns in charge of ICTs and we plead for that and have demonstrated how bad it is in terms of impacting economies. One thing that we're always looking at is the ‑‑ begin, the specificities of the countries and the continent itself in terms of nation state in the state that's making the state very fragile until terms of really being manipulated from outside I remember when we're doing that, I cannot allow somebody to create a wall. Freedom of expression and business continuity are the things that's still yet to be matured and to be discussed. Now. Patricia mentioned something about not saying anything about related to international conventions related to that and I support the need that we have to have specific criteria for which we can protect systems.
While balancing this act. But again, we are running into difficult area. Today we're discussing of service base at international level, at U.N. level. And part of the world that we are looking for international convention on service security on service base, some say we don't need that. We need a specific program so the debate is still there. Unfortunately, the African country is still in the middle.
Try to balance here and there and I hope one day we'll come into something beneficial for everyone in terms of business continuity and the prosperity overdue.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much. This is interesting. Especially about international companies directing the content and community indications. Paring through other comments that's a major change for regions like Latin America we had the same problem with United States and Miami and that's changing over time. Because of installations of ISPs. I can see there's lack of perhaps understanding benefits for the community, affordability of the final service to end user and barriers could be perhaps the impact on other businesses and competition and other business. Thank you very much, Moctar.
And I'll go now to Nurani. Nice to see you again virtually. It's been a while and we haven't met.
And in the region where you're based, it's home of the largest IXPs. We know about London and Frankfurt and whole Internet. So which are the facts you think are led to the creation of them and what can other regions and experience learn from this? Europe is interconnected with a lot of connected activities but there are regions like countries but seems to be that Europe is the main place for development of these big IXPs and welcome.
>> NURANI NIMPUNO: Thank you. I'm Nurani. I'm in London and on the board of ‑‑ I worked for IXPs for over a decade and been involved with IGF for over a decade. Early days there's a lot of interest in IXPs I thought I'd start by ‑‑ with a definition because I think when I hear people talk about IXPs to someone who works with them, I find all sorts of different definitions of them and some describe them as something very complex and some as very simple. And I think certainly in Internet governance course it's often seen as one thing that will change the Internet situation in the country.
And in fact, IXP is technically very simple. It's a piece of equipment that allows for interconnection of operators, be that an axis provider, content provider, enterprise, bank, or anyone who wants to exchange. And IXP itself doesn't actually do much. It only passes that traffic. It doesn't control that traffic. It doesn't route it to anywhere. It just facilitates it. So it's very stupid piece of equipment. So to speak. Of course, we build in other things to allow for redundancy and measurements in some cases things like that but an IXP itself is very simple. And I think you know looking at the history in Europe. Each region has their on needs but I think there's things to learn from the history of Europe because the Internet in early days of course didn't originate from Europe. Started in America and that was one of the factors that led to this. So many I'd say there were three things that led to this wildly interconnected market we have now. Deregulation in the early '90s that allowed for more players on to the market and other was cooperation in the very early days. So in the early '90s which when the Internet was still mostly academic, there was a great sense of cooperation among players and RIR forums and operator forums and this spirit of collaboration was actually key in creating these IXPs and infrastructure maturity was another one unless you have some form, it makes it hard to connect. In those early days most of the content actually came from America. So the main reason that all these IXPs were created in the early '90s in Europe was the cost factor, nowadays we talk about the benefits of low latency and keeping local content local. At the time we were talking about such small transmission so it was really a matter of saving costs. And that couldn't have happened unless the parties talked to each other. Having that spirit of collaboration, in fact when different operators connect, it can be competitive who are actually coming together for mutual benefit of both parties. That spirit of collaboration was key as well. So early days, 80% of all traffic went to the U.S. That was the main reason to start looking at ways of keeping that traffic locally. Instead of having two operators sending their traffic to another continent and back again they found ways of interconnecting between them.
The other thing that really helped was as I touched upon the deregulation because IXP really mostly benefits the smaller client because if you have a very large incumbent that sits and controls the traffic in another country, it also means they have a dominant place in the market and they can control most in the market. Smaller players can interconnected. And that's one of the main benefits in Latin America and Asia all over the world because when traffic leaves the country and you're paying an external party to control the traffic, that means money leaves the country, knowledge and competence and all that. Instead building a community around an IXP allows for that topic locally. I also say in that spiritual collaboration one of the main success factors all these IXPs that popped up all over Europe were membership and community‑based. And I'm not arguing that one model is better than the other. But at this point, at that point it was very clear that an IXP is set up to benefit the operators that connect.
I'd say all the IXPs were set up and nonprofit and Internet base, and it meant anyone connected to the IXP paid a little fee to connect and support the IXP and those fees are then used to run that IXP for the benefit of the freighter. And that was another thing that made it key that the IXP stuck to their mission of serving their operators.
And, of course, I think sometimes it's difficult to talk about what comes first, that spirit of cooperation led to creation of IXPs but another thing I think the IXPs are very positive side of things from an exchange point is it creates a community. And we've seen that in many countries, not just Europe but all across the globe. If you run an IXP well, you gather a community, you will get information exchange, you'll get trust among players and you'll be able to continue to build services that connect everybody on the IXP and the larger community. A few more things to say, but I'll leave it to others. But I want to comment on one thing about resilience and this thing that Patricia talked about on the so‑called Internet kill switch. I think again there's nothing magical about an IXP. It's just a piece of infrastructure that allows for exchange of traffic. Bud but many studies have shown that, first of all, if you have an IXP that builds a community, that means you'll get more where numbers, for individual networks and the more independent networks you have, more AS numbers you have in the country, the more resilient it is because it is not just reliant on one incumbent carrying. It's more resilient to Internet shutdowns, but also things like cable cuts or either technical or political challenges. So by having many individual networks interconnect to each other, you make in‑country resilience stronger but also the country's connection to the wrest of the world more resilient because there are more parts for Internet traffic.
>> Thank you very much. Very interesting concept about this resilience. And it may happen with political activities or problems also with natural disasters and communicated with other countries around. And the fact that the community, the political power and the companies understand the value of the mutual collaboration, I think, that's ‑‑ that's an interesting point, not easy because there are economic interests in the middle. But, if it's well explained, it's difficult to explain. Thank you very much for your comments.
We have many questions from Patricia I.f you want, maybe I can read them and allow colleagues to make comments and answers? We think that's okay.
>> Yeah, there are many and it's valuable to allow them to hear their voices. I'll read them all and maybe give the floor to each of you to comment.
How can we control the integrity and proportionality of processes appearing to deepen their relationship with other networks and that don't huge costs for small IXP companies. We have comments from ‑‑ organizations that enable APN, promote harmonious policies across IXPs related to hygiene and connectivity pricing policies.
Question to Jane. Would there be a conflict of interest if an IXP as not for profit combines for profit ISP or positive synergy and I wonder business model for IXPs could be rated huge character and telecom can be making IXPs. How can decrease the impacts of effect as most countries have been or little IXPs provide safety of the flows around the world.
And finally a question for Moctar from your perspective and experience with ethics, what is the most convenient business model to run IXN Africa and how many regional we have in Africa since the program is support regional. That's the questions from the community. I can make comment to each of you and we have to leave the room for activities. Maybe I can start with ‑‑
>> I may start?
>> Yeah, you have direct questions to you.
>> MOCTAR YEDALY: So in terms of business model to me what we have seen so far the best business model is to have a nonprofit institution that is actually basically to cover operational costs but also to be able to provide different services that are not specifically related to the IXP but deeper doctor services. And this is probably ‑‑ how many regional Internet ‑‑ we do have. Africa we support one in Kenya and one in Lagos Nigeria. We provided them with grants to be operational. Three actually, even Johannesburg one. We have three original ones I know of that we have supported by providing the not only the technical skills by training them all but also by providing them with 300,000 grants to start operations. So Thank you.
Thank you very much, Moctar. About the other questions and comments, maybe Che‑hoo can comment.
>> CHE‑HOO CHENG: Maybe I'll talk about technical hygiene part. Training and technical assistance is addressing this. We have current best practices and things like that. And also, as I mentioned, a program like manners can also help IXPs to achieve a certain level. So I think these all will help technical hygiene. And another thing I want to highlight is since somebody talks about Internet shut down. And I want to stress that IXP it is really helping people to have faster and cheaper connectivity. If you shut it down, people will still have connectivity because they'll have transit provided connections. So IXP will not be like as critical as other things. If you shut down IXP, people can still communicate through transit connections. I think that's all for me.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you.
I was looking at the question direct Shiva, the most important thing is that everyone is directing traffic and the switch is neutral to it and it would be tricky if the members competing with other members. So the Internet service provider is hosting, if they're hosting IXP at their facility, you'd have a neutrally agreed arrangement among all the parties that says okay, it's okay for IXP to be there. You'd have to have an agreement that everyone is treated the same. This is one of the biggest things about creation of IXP, neutral management, everyone treated the same. Doesn't matter if you're a big, small or medium sized carrier. I'm not sure I understand fully the question. But I would just say you don't want to compete ‑‑ you don't want the IXP to be an ISP. That's something that's often a misunderstanding. Internet Exchange Point is not an Internet service provider, as Nurani said, neutral location where traffic is being exchanged. No one is making a judgment call on the traffic. No one is benefiting more than the other from the exchange of traffic at the switching platform. So that's what I would just say. Neutrality is one of the most important things no matter what happens anywhere.
>> Thanks for that. Jane, maybe, Nurani, you want to add something.
>> NURANI NIMPUNO: I agree with that. I want to comment on the model. I see there are a few comments about that. I think it's a misconception that the Internet Exchange Point has to be big and expensive. It's important to understand that at the heart of an IXP is just an Ethernet switch. A piece of equipment. That can be run at a very low cost. And I think the main, first of all, I think there was a comment about large telcos running IXPs and I think location globally any ISP that's been run for government or teleco I've yet to see a successful one. So I think it's key that it's run neutrally. It supports the operation that's connect. Run in a collaborative way whether it's membership model or something else but one of those who connect have a say in how it's operated. And I think coming to Michael's question about what about small islands for example? I think because it's not the main issue, the main challenge and some of the smaller countries is regulation in that you need to allow for smaller ISPs to it connect. If you have a large Internet it's hard to be successful. Making it easy for anyone to create an ISP and run it and not have lots of regulation with ISP licenses, et cetera, that makes it hard for anyone to set up and then really for creating that spirit of collaboration because unless you have that community of a fuse ISPs collaborating, the IXP won't be successful. You can start with a small IXP. Make sure that you have a community, build a community where people are speaking to each other. Get regulator in. Speak to them so they understand how beneficial the IXP can be for the country and even for the incumbent and market share that the incumbent is going to shrink. And in be fact you actually re regulate it, lots of players interconnect you will grow that market and benefit everyone. Country, incumbent and smaller players and end users because it's about driving down the costs. So I think those three elements are really important to get right. If you get those things that's a good start. Even if the IXP serves a handful it does good for operators. It's wrong to measure success of IXP by the size of the IXP.
>> What I've seen in Latin America is good experience of one Internet exchange point benefits perhaps those ISPs connected to it quickly spreads all over the community and everyone talks about the benefits. It's a model that replicates easily because businesses understand the benefit and also the community understands the benefit and has affordability of the price for end user so that we have seen that in a very successful way here in Argentina and Latin America. Patricia, you want to make comments based on your research?
>> Yes, I have two quick comments. First is related to the kill switch. There is not a kill switch. That's just a question we'll term to shutdown the Internet which is difficult to achieve. You need to act over multiple elements. The IXPs play a little piece of which is related to damaging the traffic but you need to offer Internet service providers and the protocol over the domain name server, over the key holder, this is a very difficult thing to do and the level of success depends on the country that's trying to do this.
Now, in terms of the cost for developing world of not having enough exchange points, yeah, this is a problem. But that is the way the system is built right now. I want to mention something quick once well academic faculty member mentioned the difference between having enough exchange points or not having them has a direct impact over accessible Internet over economic development, and overrule human rights. This is where we need to find legal grounds are common grounds to protect the exchange points from now into the future. Thank you. It comes to my mind that the best place to have a conversation is the ground for legal issues or ideas for rules could be the IGF because we're in equal footing communication space and we have all the other stakeholders exchanging ideas together so that may be a good idea for future IGF. We have one minute left. I would like to thank all of you. I have learned a lot. IXP is a very interesting subject for me. I have seen how the Internet has grown and made it more affordable in Latin America and Argentina and the country has been one of the leaders in IXPs in the regional world so I have been following for many years the development. It seems to me that as for what we have exchange is about the human factor. It's about understanding the benefits. It's about explaining the benefits and sometimes what happens to us technicians, I'm an engineer. We don't usually find the conceptual words to regulator and government and also to the big companies that may have‑may feel they're being harmed by Internet Exchange Point in their economic benefits. But explanations that if the whole community benefits then the whole market grows. And that's good for everyone. But it seems to me that the human factor as for your comments and good experience it is shared with us in this workshop that becomes relevant capacity building as well, let the people know how to do it. And barriers for having the equipment in town is also an issue. Maybe everyone is in agreement but then there are barriers to import equipment. So that is governmental issue. And, if the government is aware of the benefits, then those barriers should be changed quickly.
I want to thank all of you and all the community for the very good questions to thank all of you for the very interesting comments and participation. Especially those of you who are waking up very early like Jane and Patricia, over to you and thank you for inviting me to moderate this session.
>> PATRICIA VARGAS: Thank you all of you. Hope to see you in person next year.
>> Thank you. Stay safe. Stay in touch and build more experience all over the world. Thank you, Regards from Argentina.
>> Thank you all.
>> Thank you very much, everyone.
>> You're welcome. Thank you, bye.