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[ Video ].

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you so that's a short video that we prepared to
just explain like a summary of what we're doing in this project.  I'll give
the floor to Noha first. I think it's YouTube.  It's a YouTube video.  I
will give the floor to Noha to introduce the project in more detail. Then I
will give the floor to Walid, and then to Neils, and after that we will
have questions.  We want to get feedback from people.  I know you don't
have a chance to go in-depth into this project now, but later on if you do
have questions, please let us know. Noha, please?

>>NOHA FATHY: This is meant to help people working at the grass roots level
assist the local legislation.  And for this purpose, we have actually
developed a tool.  Part of this project that allows people to do the
assessment themselves rather than us producing the assessment and sharing
it with their community.  This tool, we call it internet legislation atlas
indicators.  The tool is actually -- okay... The tool is a set of
qualitative benchmarks that are meant to help a wide range of stakeholders
and help them look at the legal protection afforded to digital rights,
particularly freedom of expression and privacy as well as restrictions and
see if they are unproportioned or not.  The tool is also meant to allow
users to compare their assessment with the -- between different country ss.
The tool is built, actually on international human rights standards that
are applicable everywhere, it's meant to help users and different
stakeholders in other regions. Despite the fact that the project is focused
on MENA region, the tool could be used by other regions and people working
in different parts of the world.  The indicators, we actually present them
in a visualized way.  We need to do this to make them more appealing to the
community to apply them, since we do not only have a Lee call and technical
background. So we decided to use a special technique that allows users to
compare their assessment with the community assessment, which is aggregated
results, which is an average of all the users who have applied this tool.
Allow me to give you an overview of this tool, because now we are working
on visualizing the tool.  We are working on the visualization. I'm going to
present to you this, which shows how the tool would look like as soon as it
would be published.  It's meant to help people apply it on any country.
People will be able to first of all select the country. And then after
that, for example, if we select Egypt we will go to this page.  We have 100
plus indicators.  They are classified in five themes.  Or if you wish,
indicator categories.  So we have protection, freedom of expression and
privacy.  We have content restrictions which include restrictions related
to --  hostility, criminal defamation, and a long list of restrictions
related to the content.  Journalists, and hosts and service providers.
Protection of personal data and finally we have access to the internet and
net neutrality, which is related to the universal access and net neutrality
principles. If we decided to go with the first indicator, we will start
having a list of question s.  For every question, there is like a score
card.  For every indicator, we also provide justification, explanation, as
well as the source that would assist users to know where to look exactly
for the international human right standard that is relevant to this
particular indicator. Particularly, users would be able to address all of
the questions, for example, the right of the freedom of expression is
protected with article 19 with the ICCPR.  This is explained and then
people will be able to look at their local legislation and compare their
restrictions, for example, with what's enshrined in article 19. Users will
be able to answer all of the questions, for example, for the first
category, which is constitutional or equivalent protection, they will be
able to see how the result s results compare to the community's assessment
as well, and they will be able to share it and if we -- if they would like
to see, for example, this is when they look at how their assessment looks
to the community assessment.  They can either look to assessments to
Egypts, community's assessment to's, community's assessment to other MENA
countries.  So I can look at Egypt and then compared to Iraq or Jordan, and
then users can move forward and choose a different category or different
country.  This is briefly the tools.  The indicators and the tool that we
have. When we apply these tools because we have applied this tool as part
of our project, we outlined a number of challenges and indicators that
demarcate the freedoms in the MENA region. And on top of these challenges
is applying the same legislation online and offline, which touched
implicitly and explicitly with the regulation of online content and media
workers as well as internet intermediaries.  We can see that this is
manifested particularly in the case of publications. With the absence of
provisions that regulate online speech, The Courts mostly resort to the
traditional media law.  And this actually shows contradictions and
inconsistency.  It means the rules that apply to print media are applied
online and social media with no exception.  It also means that internet
users, journalists and bloggers are all subject to the same laws and
provisions without exception. There's one more challenge, which is the fact
that journalist is brought through the licensing scheme.  Not only
journalists but online news agencies have to obtain a license.  The license
is given by a government entity, which impose conditions that they have to
comply with in order to get the license and actually practice journalism.
Another challenge is liability for third party content.  Most of the time
internet intermediaries are reliable for third-party content.  In some
cases, actually, web editors stopped allowing comments on the websites as
an expression of protest or to refrain from holding liability from third-
party content.  This also resulted in the fact that self-censorship is
rife.  This is particularly because journalists stopped reporting on topics
that are deemed taboo by authorities. One more challenge is encryption is
found in some countries in the region which leaves no option for
journalists except for self-censorship in some cases. Another challenge is
arbitrary internet laws, and this is manifested in the case of court and
laws which actually has a long list of speech offenses that are done either
by a news -- means of newspapers or other means including online. The
mostly prescribed acts like informing false news, slandering, as well as
insulting regular citizens and also insulting public authorities. So penal
code has actually has a criminal definition for public authorities
particularly in the MENA region.  They coin all of these offenses using
general terms, which means that anyone could possibly be criminally liable
for committing any of these crimes.  They use vague words like dignity and
honor without providing any clear definition for them.  This means that
this actually intimidates political opposition and clamps down on
dissenting voices. One more challenge is over-regulation.  We can see this
is manifested in two sets of laws.  The first is cyber crime laws and anti-
terrorist laws, which are on top of the list of draconian laws that
restrict online freedom and rights.  This is because they adopt vaguely
worded crimes with actually fuzzy language provisions.  They don't provide
a clear explanation for what actually constitutes cyber crime or terrorist
acts.  For example, some laws outlaw visiting immoral websites without
providing any clear definition for what actually constitutes immoral.
Others criminalize abusive messages, yet without providing any clear
definition of what could be an abusive message.  Most that are used under
these laws and the flagrant provisions that they provide related to
national security are damaging to national unity.  These are mostly the
pretexts that are used.  The other set of laws is telecommunication laws,
which outline rules and responsibilities of the national telecommunication
authorities. For example, most of the time, the regulatory authority is not
independent and it is strongly affiliated with the government. Also the law
s brought powers to competent authorities to regulate telecommunication
services, which means that they can actually have access to customers' data
and actually propose limitations related to filtering and blocking without
having to have judicial order. In some cases an administrative order will
do, and they can just exercise their power.  This is actually very
unsettling, given the fact there is no overarching data protection
framework in most of the MENA region. The last challenge is regulatory
environment.  The digital space in the MENA region is regulated through a
security center approach.  In most of the cases, it protects national
security and state sovereignty and social coherence of the pretexts used to
impose many of the provisions.  Most of the restrictions are neither
necessary nor proportioned and do not require any judicial oversight, which
means that this actually does not only stifle digital rights but also
hinders the capacity of internet users to reap the benefits of the
internet.  There is also absence of rule of laws and absence of checks and
balance s with human safeguards of human rights within the league
environment. I invite you to visit the website because there, we provide a
set of recommendations on how actually to improve this legislation and how
to make them in line with the international human rights standards and
invite you to apply the indicators as soon as they are online within the
MENA region or other countries and share with us your input on them, how
you see the indicators helping other countries and regions as well.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you. You just presented a bleak view on how the
challenges and applying legislation in the middle east can really hinder
the use of the internet in general, without discussing the full impact on
digital rights, because at the moment we are still trying to establish the
link between human rights and the internet, and how this course can make
sense to the governments in the middle east. It's only viable if we make or
if you put a price tag on it. So, if people are not free on the internet,
it has a price. We're trying to highlight that using this tool, but in a
very indirect manner, to just give people the ability to think more deeply
about how important it is to codify human rights and legislation.  It
protects your right as a user, but on the other hand, it can guarantee a
lot more than just human rights. I am going to give the floor now to Walid,
who is going to highlight very briefly how the internet legislation atlas
as a tool that can be useful for the grass roots.  The point is we are able
to reach out to civil societies and activists and people who don't
necessarily have a legal background to understand legislation.  So Walid,
you can use this mic.

>>WALID AL-SAQAF: Thank you, Hanane.  I actually have a timer here so in
case I go over time. First of all, let me say how delighted I am being
here, not only because it serves a very important purpose, but because it's
introducing something new, something innovative.  I don't recall seeing
something of this nature before.  Although my capacity as a trustee of the
internet society, I would like to also note that I've also been one of the
board members -- advisory board members of the ILA project, so in my
capacity as an academic, I see the project as something that provides
crucial information to people that do not have it.  But the question that
Hanane poses is now that we have it, what can we do with it.  If you know
the song, "now that we have love, what can we do with it?" Now that we have
this, what can we do with this?  The idea is to brainstorm.  I would like
to keep this short because I hope you, the audience can help us see how to
use it.  Helping insure that the internet is used for the benefit of
citizens across the world, let us take the information aspect of this. Pure
information, people do not understand their rights.  They don't understand
what legislations are there in their societies, what the government or the
parliament or whoever is involved in law enforcement is using to enforce or
maybe not enforce laws regarding the internet, and the middle east, in
particular, as mentioned earlier, is a troubled region where there are real
violations online and offline.  So the power that information gives can be
leveraged.  It can be used for civil society organizations and to guide new
and better legislation.  We need not see this as purely advocacy against
certain practices, but means for reforming what we have. Occasionally, I
may imagine that some legislations don't understand what the internet is
and how it can benefit society and what exactly can even the government
itself use it for. And so the idea that there is a place now online
accessible to all, very well organized and appealing in view and has even a
game.  So all of this helps those entities understand, okay, there is now
no justification for saying now I can't do anything about it. You have the
ability to get there and see the information for yourself and understand
what it can help with and what it cannot help with.  See what the potential
gaps that you find. See if you have ideas that can introduce new, better
ways of looking into how the internet can be used through legislation, but
also look into how to compare yours to other countries.  This is why the
comparative approach is very helpful.  We in the middle east share a lot.
We share a common culture, obviously a common language.  We understand the
dynamics of how things work in various regions in parts of the region.  We
understand that this can be leveraged for us to harmonize and introduce the
best practices that work best for this part of the world. Unfortunately,
many times we try to import laws and things from abroad thinking this will
be a perfect match, but it's not the way it works.  You need to develop a
bottom-up approach and understand the context and building on that to
improve the societies that live in these countries. So what I feel is
important in this project is to provide awareness and raise awareness about
the existence of the tool, ensure that the potential of use is not hampered
by lack of detail or lack of clarity because occasionally you can come to a
position of okay, I have the information but I'm not sure what it means.
So there could be efforts to help ensure that the information provided is
clear.  It has a very specific tag to it.  You can search through it maybe,
that's one way of looking into it.  You can compare revisions and seeing
how it has evolved over time.  And also compare it with other countries in
the region.  I feel like this informational aspect is quite crucial. The
second thing I would like to propose is ensure they take a more objective
approach to it.  No presumption as to why the legislation came to be what
it is.  And use this information to introduce potentially positive changes
and that would be done through grass roots as well as coordination with
different stake holders.  We work in silos in MENA, each one trying to
proceed with its own objectives, not thinking of what others might consider
as important.  So these laws and tests help us as different stakeholders
sit around the common cause.  Let us improve access and make it more
productive for society, for development.  And let us look from different
lenses, not purely from advocacy or political or economic lenses. Grandsons
roots can help promote this approach within the bottom-up approach that has
been used at the IGF and other international platforms.  It's a good
experiment.  I would say we're early at this stage to know how well it will
do.  But now that we have taken the first step, the next step will need to
be followed, which is to introduce this to the society at large, introduce
the potential uses of it and insure that everything can be considered for
improvements.  I would like to reflect on the importance of internet
society chapters as grass roots organizations that work on the ground. For
the internet as a domain, the most active entities, I would say -- maybe
I'm biased -- are chapters.  The way that chapters can use this is to allow
them to sub in themselves.  What is happening is this law for the society.
Is it something that can or should be improved?  And from that point, begin
to link with various stake holders in your community and try to bring them
around and discuss these and use this reference as a way for you to go
forward.  In the past, one justification might have been we didn't have
references that help us understand what laws are in place.  We do not know
how other countries have used these.  Now we have the information and these
grass roots organizations, chapters and others, can help foster dialogue to
promote the use of this information for better laws in this region. I have
two more minutes, but I will spare that for the discussions.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you, Walid.  Very thoughtful reflection on the work
that we're doing, and I think you provide a comprehensive outlook on how
people can actually use this tool.  Civil society, sometimes, is not
empowered enough in the context of the middle east to lead advocacy. Our
role here is not to judge these countries.  We were very, very careful when
we conceived this tool.  Because one, it happened because there is a lot of
demand from the people that we're talking to in the middle east.  Two, we
made sure it's community-driven.  All that you see on the platform is
recommended and suggested by the partners that we're working with.  We made
sure that we have partners from each country that we're focusing on because
we don't want to take the lead on the local, let's say, the local
initiatives.  We want it to be led by the partners that are based there.
We just make sure that this work is happening.  We coordinate everything so
we have a point of reference.  And I might say that ILA has been a point of
reference of a lot of research institutions, universities, professors, and
certain others find it very useful.  This brings me to how simply we're
trying to do this by introducing a technique that's going to cover the
indicators now.  I will go to Neils here because he is with article 19 and
the legal team of article 19 and how to produce the indicators that we're
trying to visualize.  And article 19 is doing a lot of work when it comes
toover ing -- to covering the region.  We're going to take you back to the
context in the middle east, and maybe you can explain a little bit of the
rational behind the indicators and how you think it will be useful to link
to the work that you're already doing in terms of analysis and the bulk
legal work that your legal team is doing.

>>NIELS TEN OEVER: Thank you very much, Anane.  I'm very happy you are all
here.  Walid is happy he is here.  I'm happy you're here because it's
Monday morning, 9:00, and we got here from all over the world.  It's great
that you're all here.  I would like to start with the board member, Marcus,
when he spoke to the U.N. General Assembly, he said that article 19 of the
universal declaration of human rights reads exactly like a description of
the internet.  The rights of freedom to hold opinions without interference
and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media
regardless of frontiers.  That's like exactly what we have been working on
on the internet, right?  Or maybe less so because the internet increasingly
mediates public debates and even elections directly or indirectly.
Infrastructure, power and water structures. With that increase of
importance, it also gets an increase of power and therefore also the need
for accountability.  You can say when you have a right You don't need
permission -- you can't say that.  When you need permission, it's a
privilege, not a right. So the internet has grown on the premise of open
standards and voluntary bodies.  But there also needs to be levels of
accountability.  And how is this done on the internet?  We set it up in a
radically distributed way, which makes it hard to govern. The internet is
this thing that arises between law, architecture, markets, and public
opinion.  And there is not one place where the internet can be regulated.
You cannot do it all through law; it will escape through architecture. You
cannot do everything on the architectural level.  The market nor public
opinion cannot fix everything.  The market needs buyers, but it needs to be
done within architecture and legal frameworks. So how does this work? We're
focusing on law here and in other parts we try to focus on architecture
like ICANN and the internet engineering task force, but that's not what
we're doing here.  So let's try to focus on law.  So imagine that you're a
judge and you need to judge on these new things and the internet is tossed
on your plate.  You already have law books that you need to know by heart
and you need to reference and you need to weigh, and then you already --
then you also get tossed computers and internet on your plate.  Well, I
don't know -- do you have any idea how many lines of code there are in an
operating system?  Let's say Linux?  Roughly?  Any ideas? Takers?  490
million in the last version of 7.  So anyone who tells you that he or she
completely understands Linux, he or she is lying.  There is a degree of
complexity that makes it really hard to understand. But having a law and
having the internet is not necessarily an angle. Then it comes to
application.  And the same concepts can be implemented and applied by
people in many different ways.  And then unfortunate lyunfortunately.  When
we talk about the internet, we have been talking about afterline and
online.  Because almost everything we do now has an online equivalent.  We
should not forget that everything has an offline equivalent.  We are right
here now in Mexico, and we've been talking about big numbers, but here is
also quite a stunning number.  Since 2006, over 26,000 people have
disappeared in Mexico.  And with the current ramping up of the usage of
surveillance software, Mexico was the biggest purchaser -- the biggest
customer of Hacking Team.  You see that the online also strengthens the
afterline rights but also violations. o rights but f rights but f rights
but li rights but ne rights but also violations.  Just because laws are
there does not mean that laws are enacted.  But we cannot keep the law if
we do not know the law.  So that is why we are trying to bridge the
understanding to see what are the bridges between all of these different
parts of law and the internet.  What is the relation between the two?  And
how do we do that.  Laws and legal traditions are different.  There are
different international traditions, but they are different.  When we
started thinking about how to compare the things, we went back to thinking
about the global network.  If we think of global standards, only real
global standards we have are human rights standards.  So that's what we
did.  We try to compare legislation and laws for international human rights
standards and see how they were reflected in different parts of the law.
These touched upon protected communications between journalists and
lawyers.  But then you get into the questions, who is a journalist?  Is a
blogger a journalist and how is that defined and applied?  Also
intellectual property.  Is there a concept of fair use.  Is there proper
oversights in surveillance?  Necessity and proportionalty?  Democratic
oversights?  Is there an obligation?  Policies for shared infrastructure?
Open spectrum? Media laws.  Do blogs need to get a permit?  How are the
media laws used?  E transactions, penal codes, it doesn't end. This was an
extremely interesting exploration that we have been doing and also
something that will not stop. This should be a living body of text.  I am
very happy that we have been able to do this with a network of civil
society organizations and all the work is available under creative comments
license.  So people can take it, use it, re-use it, and contribute to it.
So that was the vision, and I think this is an extremely good first version
that I'm looking forward to it rating and play with this and see what I can
use to make the internet a really truly rights respecting environment. [
Applause ]

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you, Neils for outlining the relevance of this
tool.

>>MODERATOR: Let me take over.  We will give you an overview of the tool as
an outlayer of the project or the indicators on.  We would like to hear
from you if you have any feedback on this tool.  How do you think it could
actually serve you, whether you are in the MENA region or outside of the
MENA region or how do you think the regions are global and could reflect
and be related to different regions generally speaking.  Do you have any
questions?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm from Europe.  Are there any concrete things that we
can do to partner with the MENA region?  I'm thinking especially because
some of us have close connections with NGOs, with politicians, how we can
make sure that the tool doesn't remain an abstract tool, but that we start
applying it to help people.  Thank you.

>>NOHA FATHY: This is very interesting because I don't know if you are
familiar with mapping project, the project that's done and actually maps
legislation in Europe.  It's more or less what we are doing, but in Europe
they do model legislation but also map the relevant stakeholers and the
practice that they have in the region.  So we have been trying to engage
with them.  We went to the assembly meeting with them last month to learn
about the best practices that is in the region for us to take back to the
MENA region and actually reflect on them.  We look at the indicators, one
of the indicators that is one of the human rights standards that is the
cyber crime convention. So we tried to look at the regional perspective
either from Europe to see the best practices or from other regions.  NGOs
actually from south America to make sort of a comparative analysis between
what do you do there and what we have and see how we could also cooperate.
It's definitely good for us to look at the best practices in Europe and
also see how we could learn from the mapping that they are doing in Europe.

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Fantastic.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Sorry for the disruption.  I would like to give the floor
to the audience now for the questions.  We have ten minutes for the
questions. So if you have any, please let the lady in red know.  So you
just have to introduce yourselves and go ahead with your questions.

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. It's clear that this tool is to be used for
our region.  But I have some questions.  The first one is we have more
clear information in this tool.  How do you collect the information and
implement it in your tool. The first one, thanks.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you. We will take a bulk of questions and address
all of them at once. If anybody else has another question?  All right.
Maybe you want to address the question?

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: The tool is meant to help different stake holders.  You
can use this tool to pinpoint opportunities on advocacy and improvement.
It could help reform and help civil society understand the legal landscape.
It's hard for some given that there are always some conflicts, legal and
technical terms.  So we help to break down this terms and provide
interpretation for them.  It could be used for policymakers who would like
to form policies who are in line with the international human rights
standards.  It could also be used for researchers who could use this tool
to produce in-depth analysis to the eco-system of internet related rights.
Still it could help private sector because there's a portion related to our
region. How to tie the business model. This could help the private sector
understand their obligations in protecting and promoting human rights on
how to incorporate this in their business model.  That's why -- and it
could help as well internet users who don't have necessarily technical
legal background.  We work with advisory board members and our stakeholders
to make sure we provide enough interpretation for all the complex terms.
We didn't want to provide something that would be hard to be applicable.
This would present another challenge.  We are always open for any comments
and feedback from the community on how to actually bring more and more
terms. When we launched the first phase of the ILA project, we opened the
door for comments, and when we got comments from the community, we
incorporated them in the second phase and now we're developing the second
phase based on the input that we got from the community to make the tool
easier for the community to use and apply.  I hope I addressed your
question.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Niels, maybe you want to feed into this.  You were
involved in the process from the beginning. Maybe you want to highlight the
source.  You asked the question about the source of information. Niels?
Maybe you can address that?

>>NIELS TEN OEVER: I would love to.  I'm always happen to be a footnote to
Noha.  What the internet legislation atlas is trying to do is being an
encyclopedia.  But one you can use when you need it and know where to look,
but also an encyclopedia that invites people to be archaeologists or
explorers to develop in parts that they might not be schooled in.  And also
for technologists who know there is an impact of their work on legal
issues, to try to disclose that.  Because there is this inherent trade of
infrastructure that it somehow syncs into the background.  We take it for
granted.  The same is true with technical infrastructure, with the cables
that are underneath the surface, with electrical cables going through the
air, we don't even see them anymore but they are a condition of our modern
society. So what this tries to do is make those things visible and tangible
and explorer again. But also that when you really need it, that you can
find it. That you don't need to go through the whole law book or through a
whole law course, actually. And it is -- I'm always surprised to see that
in the -- in prison, the most read book is a law book.  It is not weird
when you think about it, but it's a bit too late to start reading the law
book by then.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: I like that analogy that Niels is using. It's very
relevant.  I'm contributing to the project and I want to add to what Niels
and Noha already provided.  We know the region and we know how hard it is
to have access to information in general.  And the law specifically, the
text law is very hard to access.  And we have a hard time mapping the
legislation in the middle east. So use ILA as maybe a platform, like Niels
says.  A Wikipedia of laws related to the middle east and it gives ease of
access.  So people who are concerned with how human rights are codified can
access this immediately. And not only that, also understand it.  I'm not
sure if Noha can display the original website of ILA so we can go through
it and understand why we visualized the law.  You have the text law and you
also get a time line if you click on the left-hand side of the platform,
maybe Noha can go through it with the clicker.  You can get an idea of
what's going on with each country by looking at the circles.  Iraq has, for
example, more laws than Syria, for example.  You get some idea of what's
going on in that country by just looking at that.  You also get a timeline
where you get the -- like the years and you see the law and when it was
ratified or implemented and that gives you an idea of how the country
progressed or maybe it went a little bit backwards. You can make a lot of
interpretations out of this platform.  And every country is supported also
by what we call a country analysis.  So you have the text, but you also
have enough information to form your ideas on what's going on.  The source
of information is, of course, the legal, you know, or the official
announcement of the law in the gazette.  When we have access to the
original text, we do actually add it to the platform.  And some of the text
we have to do the translation because, at the moment, as you can see T
atlas is in English.  But we are in the process of translating everything,
so we can provide it in Arabic as well, and it makes sense. We received a
lot of requests, the expertise that is available to do this work is only,
you know, in English at the moment.  Unfortunately most people who are
working in this field excel in English more than Arabic, but we are working
to provide different languages.  So maybe we will add Arabic.  We have no
French now.  Iran is one of the countries.  We work with all of these
partners and we try to make sure that each country is represented in a
local partner.  We have received a lot of requests from other countries to
be added.  So from the technical point of view, the platform is deployed,
so we can be able to plug other countries or even other regions.  We have
big plans and there is a need for this.  Not only in the middle east, but
we have received requests from Africa, from Latin American and different
regions.  And we can see, you know, how people are using it because we
receive feedbacks, thank you to the ones who sent feedback immediately now
while in the session.  So we have a lot of people who would like to feed
into what we're doing and the project is open. It has an open structure.
Anybody who has added value and would like to contribute as an organization
or as an individual, you are more than welcome. That's my addition to what
Niels and Noha mentioned.  I'm not sure if Walid has a final word.  If we
don't have anymore questions, we will go through the closing notes and
thank you.

>>WALID AL-SAQAF: One fundamental important thing is that this project is
more about information and empowering people with information.  What they
do with that information is often up to them.  And, referring for example
to the question that was presented from ICANN earlier is that basically
this is an experiment.  We would like this to be out there so people can
use it and explore what creative ways are invented and thought of.
Additionally, this tool is neutral in a sense that it doesn't say that this
is good or bad.  It just presents factual information.  Everyone is able to
access this.  They can always refer to the original source from where they
got this information.  And additionally, it is up to the participants to
add further notes and maybe clarifications and references. I was among the
advocates of using, you know, the interactive form submission so that if
you have a comment, if you have a suggestion, I'm not sure if that will be
introduced.  You can immediately post it on the website -- not necessarily
directly but perhaps deliver your feedback referring to the exact point on
which you have a comment.  This will enrich the platforms considerably
considering that we are at the stage of crowd sources or crowd wisdom, if
you may.  That means that everyone has an opportunity to say something
about these laws.  This cannot work unless we work in inclusive terms. This
is meant for all stakeholders.  Governments are encouraged.  I can see my
colleague here, I was on the airplane yesterday, and he actually might
consider using this as a reference for his own government and say look,
these are the laws in these countries. Perhaps we can introduce information
about the laws in our country and that would help make it more inclusive.
The multi-stakeholder approach can start with one or it can be triggered in
combination through conference, forum, workshop.  So it all depends on what
we do at the next stage.  That's the second biggest challenge after
finalizing this is sustainable. It is used by many more people and expands
into ways that make it more successful.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you. Niels, maybe you have concluding remarks?

>>NIELS TEN OEVER: And there is maybe a call to all of you all.  Preparing
for the IGF, I was looking back at the civil society statement in 2005, and
looking at the agenda of this IGF, we have to, unfortunately, conclude that
the world on the internet has gotten a bit more grim.  In 2005 we saw the
internet as this engine for gender equality, culture and knowledge in the
public domain, to get education to everyone, to get health information to
even progress social justice and end wars and create more common
understanding.  And right now, we're talking about surveillance, violence
online, and rights to be protected.  I would hope that we can take the
internet back as a positive imaginary for the future.  The hope that was
inspired in the electronic highway.  The hope that we had for the better
world that the internet could facilitate us for getting there, I really
hope we can find that hope, that vision back here together in Mexico, and I
hope we can do that and not freeze in a defensive position.

>>HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you, Niels.  Very inspiring indeed. And thank you
for your interest in this project.  I encourage you to use the feedback
form if you have questions that you didn't manage to do here.  Or any
additions that we can include.  I would like to thank Doha.  Thank you all
and thank you to the panelists and have a great IGF. [ Applause ]

lease standby for realtime captions. Please standby for realtime captions.

UNICEF-global kids online. bal kids online.  -Global Kids Online.

>> MODERATOR: Fantastic. Thank you, Larry.  Yeah yeah yeah.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Good morning, everyone.  It's a great pleasure to welcome
you all to this panel and see such a big number of you who have come to see
us and hear what we have to share with you.  And today we're here to share
the results of the work that UNICEF office of research in Innocenti has
done in collaboration.  UNICEF country offices and headquarters in New York
and many national partners.  We are based in Florence.  My panel here today
is professor Livingston.  She is an author, and I'm sure you all know
Sonja.  Currently she's the co-lead of the Global Kids Online initiative.
And next to me, I have my colleague from Brazil in charge of several
projects with socio-economic implications of ICTs including research on
education and online risks and opportunity for children.  And to my left is
my colleague, Mario, who is from institute of internet society in Brazil
and currently a senior fellow.  Mario is a lawyer and an expert in data
protection and privacy. Before I give the floor over, I want to explain
that we will have three presentations today, and then we will open the
floor up for comments and discussions.  I want to say before I give the
floor over to professor Sonja Livingston, this this work builds on years of
research.  What you see on the screen are some of the examples of evidence
that has been generated over the past few years.  This is a result of a
growing recognition by policymakers that robust evidence is need ed.  This
is critical to inform public debate related to internet governance. There
are many positive examples where this is already happening, and in the past
few years, we have seen a concerted action by international actors and
organizations that are working to help the realization of children's rights
through the development of policies and programs.  We have seen the growth
of international movements such as We Protect Global Alliance. Bearing all
of this in mind, we set forth to build knowledge around the world.  We
wanted to create a global network who can meet together and exchange
opinions and learn from each other.  We wanted to understand children's
experiences, not only online but also in the contextual diversity and their
real lives, how they underpin internet use, opportunities, and risk.  And
we hope that this work, as I mentioned, will contribute to policymaking and
to practitioners who strengthen the programs that are aimed at realization
of children's rights in the digital age. So, we started off with four
countries as pilot countries. Our network is growing very fast and we will
be sharing from the four countries initially.  We have colleagues from
Brazil who will tell us about the results of kids online Brazil.  Chile is
also undergoing a national survey.  Bulgaria, and up to 10 countries and
more when the EU countries join next year.  This is a growing initiative,
and we hope in today and in the next few days you can come and talk to us
about this program of research and to see how you would like to be involved
as well.  We have also provided some of the publications that are here in
the front, and I also have some copies of our report. Without much further
ado, I give the floor to professor Sonia Livingstone.

>> Sonia Livingstone: Thank you so much and thank you for coming to hear
about our work. It's important that we begin with research questions, and
even research questions are a point of contestation and debate in this
field.  It was very important to us that we simultaneously ask questions
about opportunities and about risks, so that we keep together on the same
page, as it were, the different parts of children's experience and our work
in Global Kids Online really tries to keep the whole child in mind and take
a holistic perspective on the way that children are engaging with the
internet in different ways and different parts of the world, but
increasingly, in most parts of the world. Rather than seeing the internet
as something that comes from on high and has inevitable effects, our
question is what are the effects depending on the context of use and
recognizing the diversity in the context of use.  And we wanted to keep
this together in our minds and in the research that we do so that the
evidence doesn't result in an overly unrestrictive or anxious response on
the part of policymakers as we have sometimes seen in some parts of the
world.  From the evidence that I'm about to show you, there really is a
need for better protections for children around the world in relation to
their internet use, but we don't want that to be so restrictive that they
also miss out on the opportunity.  So we want to show the benefits and also
consider the harms.  To that end, we are working with the notion of
children's well being, the rights of the children under the U.N.
convention, many of which are being reconfigured or repositioned in digital
environments. Global Kids Online has really been as Jasmina said, an idea
in the making, and in the past year, we have had the funding to do a
significant piece of work allowing us to do pilot research, developing
methodology and piloting it on different countries on different continents.
We're trying to work as iterateely as we can with different partners.  We
revise the tools and try to regain in a new context, and then revise the
tools further. At the end of my presentation, I'll show you where they are
on our website.  One key purpose of coming here today is to invite more
countries to join this initiative so that we can spread the effort of
understanding the opportunities and risks for children in different
countries, and we can do so in a way that gives us comparative data so that
we can also compare across different countries. So the researcher always
likes to put up this nerdy slide with too much information that just says,
This is exactly what we did so you understand the base.  It tells you that
we're working with children between ages 8 and 17 in different cases and we
are trying to insure that qualitative and quantitative work are both being
done together so we have the children's voices and experiences on how they
are engaging with the internet, and we have the quantitative survey work,
which is nationally representative so that we can say something about
children in that country as a whole. We're just working with children who
are internet users. In European countries or in the global north that often
means all children.  Though not necessarily.  In many parts of the world,
internet use is in the minority.  For today we're focusing on those who are
internet users, and those of you who have read my numbers already from the
slide will see that I'm going to tell you about findings in four countries,
two of which we have substantial samples, in Argentina and south Africa.
And in Argentina, the research is nationally representative.  In two other
countries, Serbia and Philippines, we were really just testing the methods
across different countries. Where it is practical, we are also trying to
work with the parents.  If there is not sufficient funding or limitations
on the kind of work that can be done, we want to prioritize the children's
voice. So often what we find is parents speaking for children and reporting
on how children use the internet, but not enough from the children
themselves. I'm going to wiz through a series of slides which prioritizes
some of the quantitative findings of the survey and try to give you a
flavor of what some of the policy implications might be as well as the
kinds of data that an enterprise like ours can generate.  And I'm a little
worried that you're not going to be able to read the slides. Those of you
sitting there perhaps can.  I'm going to tell you the key points on the
slides for those for whom this is too small.  And we do have copies of the
reports at the front, and of course everything is online at
globalkidsonline.net.  We have begun by asking the simple question, how do
children go online?  It sounds banal, but in most parts of the world we
don't yet know how children go online or how many, though we have done our
best estimate to say globally, it's one in three children.  And we focused
on the devices.  This slide shows you that most children in our pilot
countries go online using the smart phone, followed by a desktop or laptop
computer with a tablet a little lower.  But the prominence of the smart
phone is a crucial and recent trend.  It tells you something about how
personalized children's internet use is, it tells you something about the
expense, and how they or their families are prioritizing the effort of
getting online for them.  And it gives you a hint of how difficult it will
be for parents or teachers to look over their shoulder to ensure they are
safe online if mobile first is already becoming crucial. The other point to
note from this graph is that in three of our countries, all of the internet
using children were using the smart phone already and the Philippines was
way behind.  You will see all through the presentation that the Philippines
children, because they have less access to the internet, encounter fewer
opportunities and also fewer risks.  One point I want to draw out is the
way that risks and opportunities go hand in hand. The converse will also be
obvious in Argentina where the children have the most internet access.
They are getting the most from that access in terms of opportunities, but
they are also experiencing more of the risks.  And I think that challenge
of how the opportunities and risks go together is an interesting one for
policymakers who would ideally, I think, like to optimize opportunities and
minimize risks. So what opportunities are we talking about?  In the global
north, we often talk about children having fun online and communicating
online.  This is important.  But in many parts of the world, the internet
is fast becoming a really crucial device for children to learn, for
children to gain information about their community and work, for children
to gain health information.  And what we see in this slide is that all of
those different kinds of opportunities are very much sought out by children
when they do have access to the internet.  So over half or even the
majority of children in each country said that they learned something every
week by using the internet.  They find new opportunities for work and
study, and between a quarter and a half say that they are gaining health
information online every week from using the internet. And I hope that
already raises further questions in your mind that we need more research to
examine about what kind of health information they're seeking, what kind of
health information they're finding, and whether they have the competence
and skills to decide on which information is reliable and useful to them.
We ask some questions about skills, and I'm just giving you examples of
what is a much larger data set that we have reported on.  One question here
is how true are these things for you that you find it easy to check if
online information is true.  And here we find some more variation, and the
slide especially shows variation by age.  By the time children are older
teenagers, they are becoming reasonably confident that they know how to
tell what information is true.  But the 9 to 11-year-olds are very
uncertain, indeed.  This is 9 to 10-year-old internet users who are very
uncertain on whether they can rely on the information that they are
accessing.  That tells us for those thinking of educational enterprises and
efforts to provide more digital skills and literacies, training for
children, focusing on teenagers is good, but it's not enough.  And we also
need more efforts with younger children than we've perhaps thought of
before. We asked a number of questions about whether children could keep
themselves safe. This is a very practical question.  Do you know how to
change the privacy settings on your social media profile?  And here, too,
we see quite a lot of variation such that in all the countries by the time
they're older teenagers, children have worked this out.  But for the
younger children, there are quite a lot of uncertainties about how to
manage their privacy settings. So, again, I think you can see that in
Argentina where children have the most access to the internet, the
knowledge and skills are the greatest.  In the Philippines where it was
much harder for children to gain access to the internet, the skills are
commensurately lower. But still they are using the internet.  They are
struggling with some of the skills, and I think at some point we have to
ask ourselves as a community concerned with children's safety, how much of
this can be taught and how much of this is a matter for the design of
the... by service providers?  In other words, is it teachers' place to
teach children to use the privacy settings on their social media profile?
Or is it for the industry to design better to find settings so that
children can use them?  You'll notice, of course, that the two younger
groups, 9 to 11 and 12 to 14 or at least 12 to 13 include a lot of children
using social media who are under the age at which the terms and conditions
normally permit. We picked out the question about whether children make new
contacts online as a way of illustrating the dilemma of the...  I skipped
over it at the start.  I said we would like children to have more
opportunities and fewer risks. We do need to address what is the
opportunity and what is a risk.  For children, making new contacts online
is an opportunity.  For many adults, making new contacts online is a risk.
Navigating the understanding between children and parents and ensuring that
children can have the opportunity to make new contacts to share knowledge
about their community or about their interests while keeping them safe from
risky contacts or potential abuse is a challenge. What we see in the graph
is that a large minority, not over half, but a large minority of children
in each country say they have made new contacts online, and there's a
slight, a definite age difference.  Older children say more, and a slight
gender difference in which boys say they encounter more of these risky
opportunities. When we come to understanding the risks, we've...  as it
were traced in the questionnaire from risky opportunities to encounters
with various risk factors to asking children if those are problematic to
them, because not all experiences of risk are directly problematic.  In
this slide we asked children in the past year has anything happened online
that bothered or upset you in anyway.  And now you see that the children
from Argentina said that three quarters had something that bothered or
upset them online.  In other countries, still significant figures.  And now
also we see that where boys take more risks, girls are more likely to
report experiences of being upset or harmed by this. My last slide is to
ask where do children seek support. And this stands in for quite a number
of questions that we've asked about the different kinds of ways in which
children could gain better support and cope with the risks that they
encounter.  So here the question was the last time something happened
online that bothered or upset you, who did you talk to about it?  And
overwhelmingly in all the countries, we see that children turn to their
friends. They are fairly likely to talk to their parents, and they are
extremely unlikely to talk to teachers or other professionals or other
adults.  So for those of us who say education must be the answer and we
want to support children in the online world by providing better education,
it has to be a problem that fewer than one in ten children talk to or turn
to a teacher when something goes wrong.  And there's an interesting
challenge for the world of educators there.  It's encouraging that they
turned to parents quite often, and there must be a question in our minds
when they turn to friends.  Are the friends helping them?  Do the friends
encourage them to hit back and escalate the problem?  Do the friends have
wise advice?  And can this be a rationale for more peer mentoring schemes
where some children are encouraged to have the useful information that they
can then spread to others? So this was not an easy year for us doing this
kind of research.  We had to design the interview schedules, the survey,
and test it in all of the different countries.  We did a lot of learning on
the ground about what worked and how to phrase things.  And this, for us,
is really an ongoing process.  So in the period ahead, we continued to
think about how best to develop these methods.  Even identifying which
counts as risk and what counts as opportunities in the different areas that
children live in is something that took quite a bit of thought.  We have
struggled over how much to produce standardized tools and contextually
sensitive tools. And our solution to this problem is in both the
qualitative and quantitative tool kit, we have core items which must be
asked by anyone doing a Global Kids Online project in their country, which
means that we can create the tables and graphs and compare.  But we also
have space for optional tools and individualized tools.  And we really
invite those we're working with to develop the different kinds of...  to
develop ways of asking questions on new topics that matter in those
different countries.  We had a range of other problems that we haven't
reported on. Children would tell us they didn't use the internet but of
course they used Facebook.  How you ask questions of children is
challenging.  How you measure socio-economic status in different cultures,
how you get the parents not to over hear everything the child is saying. In
all of these ways we tried very hard to learn from the field workers in...
on the site so that we ensured that the work was as good as it could be.
So, looking ahead, well, we're ambitious.  That was piloting in four
countries. Jasmina showed you the world map in which we're working with
others.  We are about to hear more about Brazil.  We hope to go to other
countries and we hope to develop a common data base so we can analyze how
children's online experiences has particular kinds of outcomes for them.
And something perhaps to discuss with you today is how the evidence can
inform policy. At the same time we are revising the tool kit.  And on our
website, if you look about "about the project," you can contact us.  And
you can find out how to work with us on this if you are interested.  And of
course we need to keep up to date and keep responding to further technology
and social changes in children's technology and social environments. Please
do visit our website. The tool kit is there for researchers and research
users who are thinking about doing more research in this field. The
research reports are also there.  We have expert guides on how to undertake
this kind of work.  Thank you very much.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: We would like to show you a very short video that was
prepared in south Africa, actually.  And it shows the results of research,
but also you can hear from children and their parents what they think about
digital technology.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: All right. Thank you for this wonderful presentation.
And now I give the floor to Alessandra.

>> ALESSANDRA: Let me say that this has been a wonderful experience.  We
started discussing this project back in 2010, '11, I guess, because we are
in the fifth edition of kids online Brazil.  This is a very large sample,
an annual survey. Let me give you a bit of background on our research
center.  We are providing policymakers with proper framework to produce ICT
related statistics.  We are linked to the network information center for
the dot br.  These organizations represent the internet governance
mechanism in the country.  And our nation is to produce relevant policy in
Brazil related to ICTs.  And ICT kids online is one of the key projects
that we have.  Today we have ten nation-wide surveys. Some of them are
annual like Kids Online.  The longest survey that we have is households and
enterprise.  And the regional agenda for Latin American called eLAC.
Brazil seeks to measure the achievement of the international goals.  This
is a summary of the type of data we produce.  On the individual sides, we
have households and kids online.  And we not only measure access and use to
ICTs, but also in case of Kids Online, rights and protection.  So we are
very much concerned with promotion, participation, and protection on their
online environment. And Sonia has already mentioned all of the challenges
and conceptual issues.  I'm not going to take much time on that. 6,000
interviews, about 3,000 with kids 9 to 17 years old. The same number of
interviews with parents.  If we approach a household, an ineligible
household in the middle of the process, we are not able to interview the
parents, we do not consider that household.  In case of Brazil, we do have
a pair of interviews, meaning kids and their parents or legal guardians.
And the mode of collection is face-to-face.  It is a complex survey because
it includes rural area of the country in Brazil.  This presents operational
challenge and budget issues.  I'm going to share with you some findings.
I'm not going to go very much into detail because the graphic is not so
readable.  But to give you a proportion of internet users in the country.
When you look at this, Brazil is a country of huge disparities. Some of the
country is more developed, and north and northeast, we still face a lot of
access challenges.  You can see in the graphics in terms of internet users.
In the south and southeast, we have very high proportion of the population
are internet users.  90 in the south, 88 in the southeast where Rio is
located.  When you go to the north, we have only 54% of the population at
this age using the internet.  About 8% of the children aged 9 to 17 years
old are internet users.  This is for the general population, and when you
break it down by region, these represent 23.4 million users in the country.
Even that, we have a very high population and proportion of the population
connected using the internet.  We still have 6 million unconnected children
in the country.  And 3.6 million never use the internet.  With this
particular information, we followed the partnership definition for
"internet users." Those individuals, no matter their age, that has used the
internet in the last three months.  If you have used the internet once in a
year or twice in a year, they are not considered internet users.  But we
have more than 3 million children who have never accessed the internet.
When you break this by level of agenda, age group, and social class, it is
very clear that this connectivity is highly co-related to social class.
97% of children have access to the internet.  But when we go to lower
income households, we have about half of the population at this age bracket
using the internet.  The same goes with level of education.  So it's high
liquor highly correlated. Users 15 to 17 are more likely to be internet
users.  Here is the reason for access to the internet.  We have a huge
barrier in the country. Affordability is an issue.  We have 15% of children
not having accessaccess...  are not internet users because they don't have
access at home.  This is still a major challenge for policymakers. When we
break this up by different variables like rural and urban areas, we have
the rural area, about one-third of the young population not having access
to the internet because they cannot afford to pay that or they don't have
service coverage.  And also, the low income households, one-third, they
don't have the internet because they don't have funds to pay for that. Now,
this is a very important indicator.  Here you have data from 2012 to 2015,
four years of data collection. And you can see what happens with the
device, mobile device used to access the internet in 2012, it was 21% using
the mobile phone to access the internet.  And today it has by far bypassed
the traditional computer, laptop, or even tablet.  So today, mobile phones
are the main device to access the internet.  And this has some implications
on data literacy, for instance.  Whereas, high income households, they have
multiple devices to access the internet such as tablets, notebooks and
smart phone.  When you go to the low income households and population, they
only access via mobile devices. This poses a huge challenge in terms of
development of ICT skills.  In those particular social groups, they use the
internet mainly for social media and communication activities. So this is,
as you can imagine, is a barrier to develop more sophisticated ICT skills.
And this is highlyhighly correlated with social class.  Here is the same
indicator broken by different variables.  And if you see the low income
social class that we call in Brazil, the classification is AB, C, DE.  A
and B the upper high income households, DE, 55% they only use the mobile
phone to access the internet.  That's the only device they have. Here
again, we have the proportion of children by type of internet connection by
family income.  If you see...  sorry. If you see the low income social
class, they use mostly Wi-Fi because they don't pay for 3G, 4G connections.
Whereas on the upper class, A and B, they also use only Wi-Fi and 3G, a
mix. Now I will discuss a little bit how we are using the data in the
policy debate at the national level it is important to mention that this
survey is supported by the minister, and the regional office in the
country.  We are investigating how youngers use internet to form products
and services this model is not comparable.  The whole survey is fully
aligned with kids online Europe, and also the more recent Global Kids
Online framework.  But this particular model and set of indicators are not
comparable, because this is only Brazilian demand to have this data.  Not
only government, but also academic researchers.  They are debating in
Brazil how internet exposure online are affecting kids' behavior and con
Sufrex. Here we have three specific topics that we investigate. First,
children's exposure to advertising, children's perception on online
advertising, and parents' perception on their children's exposure to online
advertising. Then we have exposure to advertising online.  Asking for
products.  We have the rate of the proportion of kids that are asking
parents to buy things based on their online experience, online gaming.  How
online gaming activities are related to consumption. Interaction on the
internet, perception about brands and products and online consumption.
Those are what we have. And other topics of interest in the Brazilian
context for policy design, we have been discussing intolerance debate like
hate speech, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discrimination-related
behavior. We do have an excellent group that supports the survey.  We have
at least two meetings to discuss methodology of what to measure and how to
measure and what to do with the findings. And also we have been conducting
qualitative studies.  We have supported the qualitative studies on child
advertising conducted by the unions versal federal in Ceara state in
cooperation with the ministry of justice.  We are also finishing data
collection on comparative studies on ICT and gender.  We are working with
FLACSO researchers in Argentina to understand the behavior of boys and
girls online. Finally, I would like to give you an overview on the
advancements of this...  on the adoption of this framework in the region.
We have been working closely with Argentina and Chile.  Argentina has
finished the data collection and they have published the data results
including discussing with policymakers in Argentina. And Chile is right now
on the field.  And they may have their report by April, right?  By April.
April will have three countries in the region with comparable data that we
can conduct cross-national studies N this network we have Colombia, Costa
Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay, but they are not collecting data yet. And
lastly, this framework here to have comparable data that will allow
researchers and policymakers to establish cross-national comparisons, and
rely on those studies to design policies, to think about strategies and
action plans.  We have two reports published. Those are the main studies we
have.  The next one will be Argentina.  With that I finish my presentation.
Thank you very much. [ Applause ]

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Thank you. Okay.  And our last presentation will be from
Mario.

>> MARIO: Thank you.  I will not keep you long >> MARIO VIOLA: I would like
to congratulate you.  The UNICEF official has just two people working on
digital rights.  They have been doing quite impressive work in the Global
Kids Online as one of the examples. I was not part of the Global Kids
Online, but reading the reports, I could see that there were important
tiers related to just the rights that are underresearched and under-
discussed on the actual agenda.  There are just a few international
documents or discussions on rights.  I think from the child's perspective,
I think one of them is ICT recommendation that I could find.  And some of
the participants of this panel, they contributed to this report.  It was
from this report that I could find this nice list of different risks for
children. So you can see the risks related to content, to contacts or
cyber-crime and online harassment and illegal interaction.  You have the
issues that Alessandra has just mentioned.  So you have idea how companies
monitor the behavior of children online to impact on their parents'
consumer habits. The same for fraudulent transactions like identity theft
and of course if you see the different risks, many of them they relate to
privacy and data protection as the idea of content or cyber-bullying and so
on.  I think we still need to discuss personal consequences from children.
And of course, Alessandra highlighted at the beginning of the presentation.
Children are quite aware of the privacy risks they face on the internet,
since most of them are changing...  using the privacy settings of the
social network. And they are more concerned about their privacy than
average adults.  So why not take into account their views and their
concerns in the discussions of privacy online or internet governance.  None
of the examples consider the child's perspective.  They just use the
parents' views or try to engage young people, but not children at all.
Moving to the legal framework for child privacy online, most countries just
rely on normal data protection rules. That's the case of the member states,
the data protection rules are independent from the age of the data
subjects.  We have some specific guidelines in Japan, but not only for
children, just for the let's say the way universities process the data.  We
have specific in the U.S., but colleagues said that they can explain better
than I will do.  The COPPA frameworks but they have a specific rule on
privacy, and that's the most famous example I have of child privacy online.
But even the COPPA framework, it mainly relies on the consent of the
parents of the child.  So they don't have, let's say, any specific rules
dealing with interaction between the child and the platform.  So it's
mainly focused on the parents' perspective.  What leads to some form of
monitoring, which could lead to child participation, child freedom of
expression and so on.  It's never the views of the child, but only the
views of the parents.  The parent will control and see if the data that's
being collected from the child is okay or not.  So they will have more
time.  And I was happy to see this morning that there will be a workshop on
Friday on child privacy, safety, and freedom of expression, because those
rights, they interact a lot.  And again another issue is because they
COPPA, it's focused on children under 13.  There is a gap between 13 and
18-year-old s in the U.S., it's just up to 13. Above that, there's no
specific rule. Should we include the views of the children in the
discussions?  Should we have specific provisions, specific rules?  And I
have to say that it's missing an international discuss, an international
framework for child rights.  If you see the reports, they touch on the IHF.
If you see the two reports delivered this year, none of them make any
reference to child privacy or child protection.  So it's not on his main
focus area, as he refers to his report.  It's missing the child perspective
in the debates.  Especially because they are more vulnerable than the
average person, so they should deserve a higher degree of protection.  We
also cannot find any discussion on the internet governance area, so there
is no reference to children.  And there is no nice paper from two
panelists.  There is no discussion of that era. Of course the review
process did not take into consideration after this child perspective
because they are...  has been said in the panel, they represent at least
one-third of the community of international users.  So they should deserve
a better consideration in terms of the views.  And there are some
initiatives.  The coalition for child online safety, we have the IGF that
deals with children because they are preparing younger audience, but they
don't take on board children or teenagers.  The same with the next
generation ICANN between 18 and 30 years old.  Again there is no such
debates.  They are not getting space.  They are not being heard.  It's more
to raise the needs of the fact that we should include more child
perspectives.  They have become important.  And concerns of privacy and the
way that the data is being collected and processed. Young children cannot
even understand what they are doing with the data, but they have been more
exposed as the internet generation, even more than ourselves.  I was born
in the '70s.  I think that we should engage more teenagers and even
children in general in the debates on revenues and privacy, and rights
online, and it should be included in the agenda.  I think UNICEF is trying
to push for that.  And UNESCO has dealt with some privacy issues.  But I
think the issue of child rights is missing in the international forum.  So,
that was the idea for today.  Just to introduce a debate and try to discuss
and comment on the different projects that are represented here.  Thank you
very much. [ Applause ]

>> JASMINA BYRNE: We are quite pleased that we have such a large audience.
That means our message is coming across to more and more people.  Now we
would like to open the floor for the discussion.  I heard by the organizers
that we can stay longer than 12:30 if there are more questions.  And just
to pose some questions to you.  You have seen today through the
presentation that we are finding quite similar things when it comes to
children's use of the internet in different countries. Is that really the
case or are we missing something?  Maybe you can tell us because you come
from different places around the world.  And what are the new issues that
we need to look into?  The critical questions as Mario was mentioning, how
do we get the evidence and concerns that we have around children and
children's use of the internet to policymakers, to the international
governance community?  And really what are the best practices of this type
of use of evidence in policymaking.  So the floor is now yours.  Please
introduce yourself before you ask a question or have a comment to our
panelists. A mic?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have from the center of child protection on the
internet.  My question is related to differences in age of the children.
So, could you detail a little bit more if you found differences, at which
age children are aware of that privacy?  Not only aware of the privacy
settings, but also what does it mean to have your private data to keep them
for your own?  And because with the upcoming January data protection
regulation, we will face this situation that we have different age
thresholds across the countries, maybe, and therefore it would be very
useful to know whether there are differences in the different countries.
Thank you.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Should we take a couple of more questions before we give
the floor to the panelists again?  There's one over there.  Okay.

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello.  My name is Allen, and I'm here with privacy
fundamentals, a new company in this space.  And the question raised in my
mind by these presentations is that given the borderless nature of online
access and communications and yet the geographically bound nature of the
legal regimes controlling it, how do you connect those parts and cross the
borders and make things work for enforceability and safety?

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Thank you. I think we have two people here?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. I'm from the web foundation. This is great work.
I didn't hear much on what is emerging from the researchers yet.  We're
looking at women's rights online.  There's a framework that we have been
looking at around education that is digital literacy, affordable access,
and content especially as it pertains to women's rights online.  I see how
women get online also impacts their children.  This would be an interesting
area to explore. But the second question I actually wanted to ask or the
first question I want to ask, really is how do you make sure the work
you're doing around children's online protection don't become the cyber
effort.

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: I work closely with Jasmina, and I want to congratulate
you all for the fantastic work.  I think we're very pleased that this has
come together.  I thought what you were saying, Sonia, about the issue that
actually we know that children tend to turn to their peers instead of
teachers.  And in the second place, maybe they turn to the parents.  This
is very interesting finding that is important for policymaking. Have you
planned on looking into what kind of information the children want to
receive from parents and teachers and also what kind of information they
are seeking or what they talk about with their peers? Because in UNICEF, we
also did an opinion poll this year about children's use of...  or young
people's use of the internet. And it exactly showed that although children
did reach out more to peers than to parents, they did not feel necessarily
ready to provide support to kids who were in dangerous situations online.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Okay.  So Sonia, do you want to start?

>> SONIA LIVINGSTONE: Those were a fantastic set of questions, so thank you
very much.  So privacy is kind of emerging as a key theme that links, I
think, a lot of people's concerns.  So just thinking about the European
context as we grapple with European data protection regulation, I guess one
thing that shows up is actually in many countries in so far as they're
dealing with international internet countries, COPPA has become not just
the law for America, but it has become defacto law for the world.  And in
many countries, I think people are saying is 13 the age at which children
can understand what are the risks online?  I think even COPPA, and I know
Katherine Montgomery, I don't know if she's here, but COPPA was passed in a
different media environment.  And what a child could understand when it was
passed in the late '90s is a different thing from what a child can
understand from the complex online environment in 2016.  So I think there
are some really hard questions for us around questions of age, and that's
probably something that I will let other panelists speak to but will have
more to say this afternoon. Perhaps just to say thinking in this very
international framework, one of the discussions was about the notion of a
child.  And we're working with the UNICEF with the definition of anyone
under 18. But those teenaged years raise crucial questions about those
teenagers who might themselves be parents in other countries. We have done
a lot of thinking about the contextual differences of childhood, and that
might be a comment to Allen on the question of how do we deal with the
borderless internet.  But real differences in the context of children and
young people's lives in different cultures, and national laws that have
been developed in those different contexts.  I guess this is one forum
where we try to bring it all together, the IGF and similar kinds of
international forum.  And I think it has been helpful to work with the
child's rights framework, something common and universal and principled for
children everywhere, but leaving space for a degree of interpretation and
contextualization. Shall I answer all the questions?  I'll let others, and
I might come back.  Yeah.

>> MARIO VIOLA: Everyone has these differences in ...

>> ALESSANDRA FRANCOIA: What Brazil reveals is the older the children, the
older the risks they face.  And also, they are more aware about the
privacy, the concept of privacy, including the different applications, etc.
I also would like to mention that given the spread of mobile devices, and
the possibility of the children who use or access the internet in their
private space, this poses a very huge problem of mediation, parental
mediation. And maybe in Europe, the implications may be different, but in
Brazil, we have about half percent of the parents are not internet users.
And this, of course, is highly correlated with social class and level of
education.  The higher the education the parent has, and the higher their
socio-economic statis, the more likely they are to be internet users.  How
they are going to mediate their children if they are not internet users?
Not only age is an issue, but also the mediation strategies for the safe
use of the internet. If I can, also address the web foundation questions on
how not to become a silo effort, what we have experienced in Brazil is not
an easy task to convince policymakers to use data.  Policymakers don't like
data, usually.  Evidence.  So we have made some progress in terms in terms
of consumption on the new model that you don't have in Europe and in the
Global Kids Online framework.  This is more easy to discuss and to bring to
the public, to the policy debate.  But the channel line protection, like
gender issues, etc., is not an easy task.  But we are making progress.  How
we are working not to become this effort a silo, we do have a periodical
expert group meeting involving policymakers, and we do also conduct policy
building with policymakers and academic researchers to discuss how to use
the statistics and evidence in the policy-making process. It's got a long
way to go, still.  But that's the way and strategy that we found as data
producers to engage policymakers in this debate.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: I wanted to say a couple of words about some of the
questions that came around the policy.  There was a question about parents
and parental engagement and the age. We found, for example, in South
Africa, that parental skills are on the level of 11 to 12-year-olds.  So
what does that mean when it encourages parental engagement?  Where they are
not able to follow-up what older kids are doing online.  So some of the
strategies that I think we need to agree on is how we actually support
parents to have better relationships with their children, to establish
trust and communication so that children share with them what is happening.
Because we did ask in our research also about the quality of relationships
that children have with their parents, and they were pretty positive.
Obviously there is much there that we could do together.  When it comes to
education policies, our colleagues from UNESCO have done a mapping of
skills and literacies, and as we see through our research that younger and
younger children are going online, these policies are mostly addressing 12
and above. So we need to think again and talk to education authorities and
foreign ministries that these skills and literacies need to start at a much
earlier age. And you know, how do we consistently...  I think one of you
was asking how do we consistently have a message for policymakers?  I think
we need to see that all the rights of children on the internet are
mainstreamed in all the ICT policies that are done at a national level, an
international level.  Whether there are information society, whether
they're economic policies, the deal with ICT and development. We're talking
about a generation of children who are going to be future users, and what
does it mean for their employability and the skills they are developing for
the market economy in ten years' time.  It's not only about laws and
policies particularly addressing children's rights and issues. Of course
ICT needs to be mainstreamed in those as well, but we also need to
mainstream children's issues in all the other policies that exist at a
national and international level.

>> MARIO VIOLA: I think there is no magical formula to solve this issue.
But of course included in the debate, while putting around the same thing
with different stake holders, I think having a multistakeholder approach is
necessary.  The IT ones are the ones who process the data and interact with
the children.  They should be included in the discussion, and since most of
them are in the U.S., some U.S. laws, they become the law to different
states.  I think it's important to include competence, of course.  But they
have to raise it to an international level. It's an issue and a discussion
that is missing.  But there is no, let's say, pre-made formula. We have to
discuss and it has to be part of academia and so on. That's the main
points.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Sonia?

>> SONIA LIVINGSTONE: I just wanted to go back to the question about silos,
which I think is a really important question.  And I want to make two quick
points.  One is something about intersexuality. Children are also gendered.
Girls are doubly disadvantaged at times.  There could be projects that work
with their mothers to overcome, I think that's a fantastic idea. Perhaps
more controversially, what I think about the silos about the so-called
vulnerable and marginalized who are, in fact, the majority not the
minority.  And then children or the disabled or the elderly who get very
little said about them. Actually, we adopted a vast majority of the world.
What's extraordinary in a way is the internet user is somehow imagined
as...  I'm trying not to look at those in the room, a white middle class,
middle-aged male.  That is not the typical user and that is not who we
should be designing the policies and internet for.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: There are a couple of more questions.  One and two?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is Kelly from Korea.  I'm a civil society member,
and I want to pose a question, like, it's been bothering me that when we
talk about like children protection online, we always talk about how to
protect them, but we are kind of overseeing that children's rights like
right to privacy and right to access information are like compromised.
I...  thank you for the great presentation and great effort and great
research.  But I totally agree with Mario's comments that like children's
perspectives are, like, ignored in the research and in the discussions.
Like in Korea, you know, we have... south Korea has the highest
participation rate, and like 98% of our kids are natives.  So the elders
are freaking out about protecting the different mediums online.  And last
year our government passed a law which compelled all telecommunication
companies to install this monitoring parental control app on all kids'
smart phones.  Kids in Korea is under 19.  So, like, it includes kids and
like young kids and like juveniles and young juveniles as well.  The thing
is, so it was very pessimistic approach by the state.  They enforced this
law, and they completely ignored the kids' privacy that can be compromised
by the monitoring apps because it stores and transmits all of the personal
information to the companies, the app developers and all. Like last year,
citizen lab from Toronto university audited the monitoring apps that are
mandated by the law, and a few of them were found to have very many
vulnerabilities that expose children to this privacy risks. So does UNICEF
have a plan to reresearch into this topic, how to protect children without
compromising their privacy or their right to access information?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. I'm from UNESCO.  It's great to hear about
such a great project from UNICEF in collaboration with UNESCO in Latin
America and southeast Asia.  I want to touch on what our Korean speaker
just touched on, children's rights. I heard that privacy and data
protection of children have been well highlighted in this initiative.  I'm
also very concerned about children's act to access to information and
freedom of expression. Fundamentally right to privacy. I believe that we
support each other in many cases and I wonder how you perceive this from
the right of free special access to information in the children's
initiative.  And any evidence found that maybe children's rights to access
information and freedom of expression being sort of limited and restricted
in the situation in some countries. Second question is about gender.  I
think our speaker also mentioned about women's issues.  For the young
people and they are 18, 19, and evidence being found about young girls may
be sort of different vulnerability and being harassed or have more
difficulty to access to protect themselves to be benefitting from the
internet.  That's also another concern.  Thank you.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Thank you. Is there anybody else?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. Thank you for the great work. It's exciting to
see what you're doing, especially Sonia, you being able to scale out
consistent work internationally. My concern is with...  we developed a
COPPA safe harbor that attached on to student privacy laws that were
specific to the United States.  I think there's a good temperature for
providing assurances that the technology that students are using at school
has been vetted for that accountability and the transparency piece.  When
we look across the country, particularly anywhere, you can choose anywhere,
when you see children using sites in the education space, there's usually
very little oversight or understanding about security and about actual,
where the data goes.  So I'm interested to see if this is something that
you see could be done in other countries where they would be in Brazil,
education assessment, and then there could be some consistencies that were
regional and then also global?

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Larry?

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think someone here talked about how children as they
get into their teenaged years are getting better at recognizing fake news,
but the fake news could have had an impact on the U.S. election, which of
course, involves people over 18.  I'm wondering what we do know about fake
news and its impact.  I'm surprised by the number when you indicated the
percent to which kids are aware of that.  Perhaps kids are smarter than
adults.  But it does seem to be a growing issue and growing concern that's
being expressed in the U.S.  Thanks.

>> SONIA LIVINGSTONE:

>> JASMINA BYRNE: We are certainly going to continue working with our
partners in Latin America, with Sonia and her team and many other countries
to spread Global Kids Online more globally.  We will be looking into
possibly some other modules that we could add on hate speech,
discrimination, freedom of expression, and trying to understand better
privacy, freedom of expression and protection, and how they interact.  We
do have a model on civic engagement, and we asked the children if they read
the news online, if they engaged in a community action.  And we see that
while a lot of children read news, fewer are actively engaged in civic
participation, but we don't know why.  Is it because they don't have
possibilities or maybe they're not interested in being engaged online and
would rather do good civic work in their own communities or through
schools. For this type of research, we need more qualitative studies
targeted at specific groups of children. So maybe, Mario, you can answer
some of the privacy questions?

>> MARIO VIOLA: I will make a few comments.  The idea of controlling, of
course it impacts not only privacy, but freedom of expression, access of
information, and the prospect of civic participation of children. It's part
of the whole discussion of digital rights. You have to try to find the
balance between protecting.  I think the first...  the Korean colleague,
she mentioned it. But we are always discussing the idea of protecting
children online.  So as related to cyber-bullying and access to illegal
content.  But we have to promote rights.  That's the main challenge we
face, to try to engage in the discussions. That's also the idea of the
perspective of protecting and enforcing rights.  It is something that has
been done for a while.  The issue of data retention laws, which was the
Korean example, it's a threat in every part of the world.  When we include
different data retention rules, it's always a challenge for privacy and
freedom of expression, because you put in the hands of the state the
possibility of monitoring content and see what people are doing, sometimes
it prevents people of exercising their full rights because they are afraid
of being controlled and being, let's say, punished by the state and so on.
So I think it's a good moment to raise these issues.  We are looking to the
different.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: Among people who are not necessarily experts, and many of
them are parents, they start saying we have no idea what our kids are doing
online.  We need to understand at a convention, the rights of the child
that gives children the right to privacy from their own parents as well and
their freedom of expression is linked and their participation to their
evolving capacities because not all children will have the same level of
capacity to participate actively in the matters that affect them.  What is
happening in south Korea is something that is worth looking at in more
detail.  I will talk to you maybe more after this.

>> SONIA LIVINGSTONE: We asked how children judged the information before
the fake news issue arose.  But I think,  there's something complex about
what it is that people can understand, children included. And that is how
the online environment is structured for them.  Children judge whether they
can understand what's good information and what's bad information with the
criteria available to them.  And what we now see in the fake news debate is
the criteria about how information ever becomes public, how it gets
circulated and where it's produced.  It has become so obscure and so fast-
moving and so complex that my guess is actually nobody understands.  I
wouldn't say that children do, either.  But, I somehow... slightly
complicated note, but I want to link that to questions about privacy.
Because I think people don't know how to judge. They don't even know how to
judge when their information is private and whether they are appropriately
protecting it or who is invading their privacy and how they data is being
used. And maybe one kind of answer in the policy point is that those who
are tracking what's happening with school data collection and I think
there's also stuff around the way in which governments are using people's
health data, maybe there's a place to push. Because until people see that
their governments are treating their data fairly, they don't even have the
language with which to argue that companies should be treating their data
fairly.  So they can't even see the ways in which their rights are being
exploited or ignored. So perhaps a policy point would be to say in relation
to schools and in relation to health data and research data, that's where
one might start saying...  and then people will again to see what does
transparency look like?  What does fairness look like?  What kind of
information could be being provided to users? And then they could ask for
that more widely there are real limits in the way of what we can ask people
in such an opaque and complex digital environment.

>> ALESSANDRA FRANCOIA: Just some final remarks.  We had a conference in
the beginning of November, and I had the privilege to participate in that
conference.  And one finding that is very important, all of these issues
being discussed here about critical use of information and privacy, etc.,
and citizenship engagement, has to do with education.  So the key action
that we have to work with the policymakers is how to bring all of this
topic that we're discussing into the education.  We had UNESCO called the
Asia Pacific center for international understanding that is discussing to
make a work. And how to engage children on this debate.  The problem is
first we have to have a mix of qualitative approach and quantitative
approach, and bring these findings to the policy debate.  But also it is
very difficult to scale up, for instance, the initiatives being conducted
in Korea is wonderful, but how to scale up in a country like Mexico?  Like
Brazil?  Or like in India?  So this is the challenge.  And just to
finalize, I think that we have a long road ahead to reach the point of
having very effective policies that really considers privacy issues.  And
we can protect and promote children's online environment.  Thank you.

>> JASMINA BYRNE: With these final remarks, I think we have come to the end
of our session. Thank you all very much for coming today and for
participating.  We have some copies of our summary report. And you can find
all of the other information online, including country reports and what
they do with their data. They are also reporting to us how they are using
the evidence, and thank you to the panelists once again.  I think you
deserve a big applause. [ Applause ]

captions.

Please standby for realtime captions.

>> KAREN McCABE: Good afternoon.  We're going to wait for some folks to
take their seats.  We'll work with the venue as we have it here.  I
appreciate everyone's patience waiting to start.  We know that lunch
started the same time that this session started, so we wanted to give
people an opportunity to grab something if they needed to. Okay.  So we're
going to jump right in.  So good afternoon.  I'm Karen McCabe, and I'm with
the IEEE.  And I work on many of our collaborative efforts that address
internet governance and connectivity.  So welcome to our day 0 event on
advancing solution ssolutions for connectivity: Improving global
coordination and collaboration.  We have ICANN, IEEE, the International
Telecommunication Union, UNESCO, the World Bank and the world economic
forum.  So we also want to thank IGF for the opportunity to host this
event.  So the way the afternoon will unfold, after some introductory
remarks, we will launch into a series of lightning talks.  One will be on a
current set of themes, and then one will also be from a regional
perspective.  And we really wanted to to be extremely interactive.  I know
it's a tight room.  We will also have break-out sessions that we can share
our perspectives and learn from each other and see how we can advance
solution s.  So let's get started. I'll start by saying a few words on
behalf of the IEEE. Just to set the context, we're known as one of the
world's largest technical professional associations.  We have over 430,000
members and our mission is to advance technology for humanity.  The
connecting the unconnected as you can see, is very near and dear to IEEE's
heart.  The way we advance technology for the advancement for humanity is
we do this for hundreds of local communities around the world that we have.
So today we're here to connect. With this, I would like to start my remarks
talking a little bit about interoperatability.  My roots, just for
background, are in the technical standards word. Interoperability implies
there's a range of vendors who work together.  Things, systems, etc., work
together seamlessly. It goes beyond just being compatible to full
integration and flow.  I think that categorizes the spirit of what we're
trying to do at this session.  That's why I bring this concept up.  It's
our collective work among the many projects and initiatives to connect the
unconnected that will be able to meet the goals that we have put out for
ourselves and reach the sustainable development goals as well. It goes
beyond compatibility and is a true form of organic interoperability.  The
purpose is to build the framework, our system, our network, basically our
fabric, as we work to address global issues on a local level with a for
human-centered focus.  There are many challenges and opportunities that sit
in front of us.  If we are to meet these goals set out for ourselves in
connecting the unconnected and bringing the internet to those who don't
have meaningful access at this point, there's more work to be done. But I
think collectively, we can do wonderful things together. So the good news
is there's a growing visibility and awareness of the challenges of the work
being done on connecting the unconnected, and we'll hear some of those
stories.  There are many significant initiatives and projects being driven
by many organizations and bodies.  These efforts are looking at a broad
range of digital divide barriers.  Financing and investment, policy
regulation and technology to name a few. So the next phase is to see how we
can connect our efforts and connect this framework in this network of
interoperability and create this interoperability paradigm.  And that's why
we are here today and why IEEE and communities of technical experts are
committed to working alongside everyone working on projects in the
interconnectivity space. Earlier in 2014, we stood up an internet
initiative.  And I have the original charge, if you will, to connect
experts with policymakers.  That initiative has given us a tremendous
opportunity to get connected to many organizations doing impactful work in
internet space, many of which are sitting on this stage alongside me today.
We believe that we can connect our local communities to be part of a
connectivity core or a larger community.  And we're also pleased as an
example, we have our humanitarian folks from Tunisia this week who are
doing tremendous things from a volunteer perspective, primarily working
with libraries.  If you stop by our booth, give a bit of a plug, you will
learn what they're doing.  It's just the spirit of what we're looking to
accomplish today as well.  And they epitomize that. In closing I look
forward to an amazing afternoon where we can learn from each other and we
can advance solutions for meaningful and impactful connectivity.  I will
hand over the mic to my colleague, Joyce.

>> JOYCE: I hope for some fruitful discussions later this afternoon.  Now
considering the current political environment that we live in, the concept
of an inclusive internet of an open and secure and trusted internet is
crucial.  And I think it's fair to say that all of us today in the room.
We're very glad to see that the IGF has taken up the theme of access for
development in the overall agenda.  The renewal of the IGF mandate has
reset the focus of the forum towards the sustainable development goals.
It's now time to look concretely on how we can move forward.  How we can
have an impact and have a meaningful impact.  A good example of how we can
move things forward is a framework developed by the IGF on the policy
options for connecting and enabling the next billion. This is concretely
how the IGF can serve the community. Now how do we move from speech to
action and from action to relative positive impact? There are many examples
of projects and Karen just mentioned a couple that show a positive impact
on the lives of people.  The internet society has funded and supported over
200 community projects globally over the last ten years, providing access
to the internet of opportunity to people all over the world. When mapping
those projects to the SDGs, we realized that those projects directly or
indirectly connected to and supported 14 out of the 17 SDGs. However, the
positive impacts these projects have on people's lives are only possible if
we work on this together.  If all stake holders come together to create an
environment that enables an open, trusted, and affordable access to the
internet.  To preserve the internet as we know it, to make it better,
safer, stronger. Today to make development a reality, all of us need to
work together on immediate steps to expand infrastructure, to foster skills
and entrepreneurship, and develop a positive governance system.  This is
what at the internet society call a policy framework for an enabling
environment.  It will be important to walk away today after the discussions
we have this afternoon with a plan that can be tangible contributions to
the IGF and to link it to the main session on Friday on connecting and
enabling the next billion.

>> KAREN McCABE: Thank you, Joyce.

>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon everyone.  ITE is thrilled to be working
with all of you, and of course we, like others on this panel and others in
the room, we, too, are resolved to work together to advance connectivity.
Because this issue is far too big and far too important to be done alone.
Connectivity, as many of you know, is deep in ITU's DNA, since our very
beginning back in 1865.  The key focus is about connectivity, and many of
you are familiar with our connect 2020 agenda.  Connect 2020 is a
commitment by all governments, and it's an invitation to all stakeholders
to work together to advance specific and measurable targets in the areas of
growth, inclusiveness, sustainability, innovation, and partnerships. 3.9
billion...  that's a figure that we will be hearing all throughout the
week.  3.9 billion people that are still offline.  When we look at the
world's least developed countries, the situation is not good.  In six LDCs,
access is less than 3%.  And we all know that the 2030 agenda, goal 9, 9C
specifically, calls for all of us to strive to achieve universal and
affordable access in LDCs by 2020.  We have a lot of work to do.  And in
the words from this morning in the main session, we have a lot of
unfinished business.  Two weeks ago the ITU launched the measuring the
information society report, and what they showed in that report that as
many of you know, 95% of the world's population lives in areas that are
covered by mobile cellular.  84% of the world's population live in areas
that are covered by mobile broadband networks.  Yet $3.9 billion people are
not on the internet. As Vince said, we have a lot of unfinished business to
do, and that's what we can do this afternoon in our session. We need to be
focusing on demand.  We need to be focusing on ways to drive demand and to
stimulate demand and to do that, we have to tackle the challenge of
affordability, because affordability is a major issue as costs are
prohiptively high, in particular in developing countries.  We also need to
focus on digital lit viae rahcy and skills.  And of course, we need to
build trust and confidence in our networks.  We need to do more to minimize
the negative impacts of cyber insecurity and cyber instability.  We need to
be innovating together, and we need to be focusing on SDG17.  As I said, no
single entity can do this alone.  Bebelieve that by working together, by
sharing expertise and experience by sharing our insights, that we really
can make real progress and we can accelerate growth for the global good. A
couple of months ago, many of us came together for the internet for all
initiative. The minister is not here.  He said coming together was is
beginning.  We did that. Keeping together was progress. And we're still
together, so that's good.  And working together is success.  And I believe
that all of us today and on ward can work together to make success and to
ensure that those 3.9 billion people have access to the internet.  Thank
you. [ Applause ]

>> KAREN McCABE: I'm going to pass this mic down to Manau.

>> MANAU: We saw a small uptick, and what can we do as a community to
really accelerate efforts to close the gap?  In a meaningful way? A lot of
times at the IGF rbis you hear about the multistake holder model of
internet governance.  I think what we have done all together is make it
real.  I would say maybe two years ago the technical community may not have
been as organized as they are today thanks to Karen's leadership, IEEE's
leadership. I would say that we didn't necessarily have important stake
holders and development banks at the table like they are today. I would say
that we did not have global conveners and all the leadership that they can
bring at the highest levels like we do today.  I'm thrilled to see that we
are making the mod thiel we talk about a reality when it comes to
connectivity.  Since we are in the Americas, I wanted to provide a bit of
context about the state of connectivity here. 90% of the region is covered
by mobile broadband.  Closer examination of the figure reveals that only
about 50% of the people are connected or online. online.  Research into
this cause points to multiple reasons.  Lack of locally relevant content
and affordability among segments of the population. The benefits of the
internet are starting to come to the Americas.  Many countries are
progressing at a very fast rate. The United States, Mexico, Chile,
Colombia, are among many to mention.  Mexico ranges strong with 123 million
users and an adoption rate of 56%. But we need to tell the other side of
the story.  Bolivia, Belize, and others are on the bottom.  There's a
reason why access is high in Colombia but low in Bolivia.  There's a reason
why it might be high in Chile and low in Guatemala. Some governments do
much more than others to facilitate access for people in poor or remote
areas.  And the starting point for every country is to have a clear and
comprehensive national broadband plan that allows for private investment,
encourages competition, removes obstacles and takes advantage of schools,
libraries and community centers. That's partly why the United States
launched the global connect effort to bring an additional 1.25 billion
people online by 2020.  It's the right goal and there's a huge return on
investment.  According to one study, penetration levels across the
developing world provides a rate of return as much as $17 for every one
dollar spent. Global connect had a new idea that it brought forth.  The
idea is that internext connectivity is as fundamental as roads, ports,
electricity and infrastructure.  We have learned through this initiative
and through our outreach that typically only 1 or 2% of the budget goes to
connectivity today.  We think there's a demand for companies.  And we have
been thrilled with the support that we have received. The initiative has
many roles. Second, to work in cooperation with multilateral development
institutions to double lending to connectivity technologies by 2020.  This
was an agreement that we reached at the World Bank in April.  We also
reached another important agreement, which is to think about connectivity
and how it can have impacts not only for governments but also for banks in
providing better connectivity for hospitals and schools, etc.  And finally
to harness...  to implement solutions for high speed affordable access.
Since the launch, over 40 countries and several in the Americas have
expressed support and we are thrilled to be partnering with them.  When I
first thought about launching the initiative, we got great advice from the
network start-up resource center.  They encouraged us to take a listen-
first approach.  Offer your services and your support to countries.  Make
sure that they are aware that the resources exist, and simply be there to
help and listen to where they need the most help. Whether it's on the
technical, investment, or industry side. With that humility, we can all
succeed.  We are so excited to be here today and grateful to our partners.
We look forward to not only today's discussion but really trying to
accelerate progress in the coming years. Thank you so much. [ Applause ]

>> It is wondered what the scientific and cultural organization has to do
with connectivity or striving to achieve our common goal of universal
internet access by 2020.  First we provide policy advice to member states
in our domains.  We are a clearinghouse because we're an independent broker
in this field.  We don't have any interests to protect. We facilitate
international cooperation and we strengthen capacities including
institutional capacities in member states.  And of course we have a very
strong linguist civil society, and actually UNESCO's member states adopted
the principles standing for human rights-based open, accessible, and multi-
stakeholder shaped internet.  So multi-stakeholder is really part of it,
too. One first point that I want to make is clearly connectivity is not
equal to providing universal access.  Of course we are fully working with
everyone on connect ing.  Why do some people never use access?  And of
course the competencies is mentioned and affordability was mentioned by
some of you before, too.  Meaningful content and the barriers of language
where thousands of languages can actually not be accessed today are really
barriers.  Girls and women have less internet access and often it alters
the skills. There are a number of barriers which add to the pure
connectivity barrier.  And I think we have come a far way also in terms of
us acknowledging this.  Before, sometimes a goal of UNESCO was the only one
speaking on the second part of the same coin. And we heard today that
several of us mentioned that.  For us it is also important to walk the
talk, to really...  in fact, it is really relatively simple, as challenging
as it might seem when I say that, to connect, for example, schools. It is
much more challenging to make good use of ICTs in teaching and learning, to
train the teachers, to integrate, to produce content, to integrate it into
the curriculum, to revise evaluations, to create policies. And walking the
talk means also that we need to invest differently, and really provide
substantial amounts from the outset when we conceive a project into the
components.  We are delighted to contribute to the efforts and of course we
see the compliments in our work. And we see the necessity to bring both
parts of the  coin together. And one last word on how we have about more
than 70 offices and institutes through which we work, and 195 national
commissions in nearly all states through which we work.  We have about 550
actives.  That's the part where we need to connect with everyone.  Thank
you.

>> We're switching here.  Thank you Karen, and thank you to the IEEE who
really carries the weight to get us all here in the room and be able to
have six hours together to try to solve these problems.  And thanks to my
co-hosts who are here with me to really share how we believe what needs to
be done.  Over a year ago, we were challenged to the global connect
initiative to connect 1.5 unconnected citizens of the world.  There at that
meeting was the president of the World Bank, Dr. Kim, who fully endorsed
the initiative.  We then followed that up with meetings during our spring
meetings in April 2016, where we were very proud and honored to host Dr.
Kim...  excuse me.  Dr. Kim and secretary John Kerry who came and
basically, again, echoed the need to really marshal resources together.
Because this is such a big, big issue that we have to deal with. And it's
not going to be easy. It's not as easy as the mobile miracle was.  We're
going to have to be much smarter.  It was reiterated that if we're going to
bring online and make functional several billion people into the digital
economy, we better do it quickly because the opportunity cost of not doing
that is going to cost more highly than it would now. We had two days of
intensive, comprehensive workshops to try to solve this problem.  I think
we made great strides and had great discussion.  So you're asking is this
all we do is meet?  Well, no.  We have to do more.  And so, the World
Bank's view is that we can do our part.  With that little part, we hope to
leverage big, big, big, big money, big, big technical assistance.  What the
world bank does, we have two organizations within us.  There are actually
five, but two that really are known as the financiers.  The World Bank and
the international finance corporation.  So we're saying let's get together.
Let's create the World Bank group broadband initiative. We're looking
internally first. Before we can really exapproximate pact to be the world
leader that we can be.  In August of this year, our president, Jim Kim, and
CEO of the IFC came together and made a commitment at the TCAT, the Tokyo
international conference on African develop and said we're going to invest
$4 billion.  Well, that's nice, but where is it going to get us?  We expect
to get 250 million more people online, and we expect that with this amount,
we can leverage another five times that.  If we do that, and our donor
partners also do that, we may solve this, so that's what we're going to do.
We're going to work differently internally and meet those objectives over
the next ten years.  We're trying to do our part and with all of your
assistance, I think we can do much,much more.  I look forward to sharing
ideas with you this afternoon and really moving this towards results.
Thank you. [ Applause ]

>> Good afternoon, and thank you very much for inviting ICANN to be a part
of this as well.  I wanted to...  I thought there was an advantage in going
last, because I think...  I think in reflecting on what's been said,
there's a number of clear issues that come out of it for us in particular.
I'll say a bit about what ICANN contributes to this later on.  I won't
speak for too long.  First of all, what are the positives?  Because there
are some negatives, but what are the positives?  I think the positives are
that we're in this room talking.  The positives are that governments,
businesses, civil societies, civil society organizations are committed to
the goals.  So that's the positive.  If we weren't all committed, if we
weren't in this room all committed to achieving these goals, then we
wouldn't have success.  So the positives are we're here.  The positives are
we haven't got our act together before, but perhaps we have now, and the
positives are that there is a real agenda going forward. As you've heard
with projects in numerous countries and the World Bank and of course, with
the government initiative as Manoe has been outlining.  There's lots of
positives.  And technology is going in the right direction as we'll hear
later on.  The technology is leading us into an area where we should be
able to do much more.  The goals set out in the 2030 agenda at the U.N.
last year should be realizable in terms of technology. But where is the
failing? Where is the bad news?  Because there has to be bad news.  I'm not
saying bad news is good. But if we listen to what is said, if we look at
what is... if we look at the statistics. If we look at the take-up rates
for broadband in Latin America and elsewhere, there must be bad news.
Where is that bad news and what can we do about it?  We heard at telecom
world the fantastic initiatives that are taking place in the northern
African corridor.  Connectivity. Lots of money, lots of initiatives, lots
of effort to do connection.  But we also heard from operators at that
conference, they said yes! You as a northern African government, you're
committed to this agenda and the sustainable development goals and
connectivity.  So why are you taxing us?  Why are you charging us for 4G
spectrum?  Why are the prices so high?  Why aren't you doing pairing? Why
don't you have independent regulation?  Why don't you have competition?
Why don't you teach in your schools? Why is there agenda gap?  These are
the questions that we have to ask as well.  Because unless we get those
fundamentals right as well, then all of the other positives aren't going to
really offset those disadvantages.  So we have the environment to do this.
We have everyone sitting in the room.  And we really must do better in
terms of some of the fundamental policy legislative and directions.  And
there's also the other outside factors as well. Cyber-security, privacy,
intellectual property.  Yes they are connected.  Yes they do have important
connects in terms of how the sustainable development goals are going be
realized there are positives, but there's an awful lot of work to do. ICANN
is a player.  We coordinate the do main name system.  We introduce
international domain names. We're committed to multi-lingualism.  We're
working on universal acceptance to the new domain names can be accepted.
We have to have this wider conversation as well. Thank you very much. [
Applause ]

>> Nigel should have went last.

>> ALEX WONG: I see many friends and partners in the room that I'm looking
forward to catching up with other the course of the week.  We're also
together with global connect and IEEE, maybe the newer actors to this
space.  We at the world economic forum saw that we needed to bring together
partners, multistake holder collaboration around this issue of fundamental
internet for all. I'm pleased that we're together as IGF because I think
we're trying to show a couple messages.  This should be a solvable problem.
There's individual solutions that all of you in this room are probably
involved with, or global solutions.  If we can just all work together, we
have to be able to solve this issue.  I think the second point, therefore
is, and this is the work we have been doing.  It's been echoed by other
panelists. This is an eco-system issue. It's not just infrastructure or
affordability.  Our framework also includes the need for skills and
awareness and also for content.  And that's why everyone in the room has to
be working together if we're going to address the issue. Therefore, there
could be others on the panel at this front line as well, and I'll just
mention a few of the other partners that have been part of the global
effort to work together.  I've named organizations on purpose because I
think as global organizations representing an association of some sort or a
governmental or intergovernmental or civil society on a global level, we're
trying to work together globally to try to come to you together as one
voice and one effort. That's in the form of two areas that we're trying to
help work together with everyone here on the panel on that we're looking at
specifically.  One is on a set of global topics.  So later on in the
lightning rounds, these topics have been building on these global
discussions on a series of topics where we think everyone needs to be
working together on in terms of turning the common themes into actions.
That is how the first round of lightning talks are shaped.  The second
element, which is part of Doreen, let's take it to action is on the country
regional break-outs.  I'm happy at the forum that we've been trying to
broker a couple models, but collectively, us on the panel have made a
commitment that in 2017, we will try to come up with a portfolio of five to
ten countries where we can all agree to try to coordinate together. It's
not just all of us from the non-business side but the corporate partners
sitting in the room like Facebook and Microsoft and others in the room that
I'm sure I'm missing.  A year from now, when we come back, I hope we're
moving into country operational phase, where we're creating a platform
where we can all work together. That's why all of you coming from your
different organizations are invited to be part of that journey over the
course of the week.  Please come talk to any of us to find out how to get
more involved.  This is only going to be solvable if we have everyone work
together. I'll stop there since we have a lot to cover over the course of
the next few hours as well as the next week.  I want to thank, again, all
of our partners on the panel and those in the room because, as I said, this
should be a solvable problem and I think this is a great opportunity to get
more momentum in the IGF. [ Applause ]

>> KAREN McCABE: Well, thank you.  We're going to move into our lightning
talks.  Thank you, Alex, for setting the tone on the topics or themes that
Alex briefly touched upon.  To make it a bit more comfortable up here,
because we have eight topics and eight people as we can tell is a little
tight up here.  What I'm going to ask is the first four, if you will, of
the lightning talk speakers, we'll have our moderator come up.  We'll have
Christopher, Paul, Mitchell, Doreen, please stay.  And then we will swap
out to the other four speakers if that's more convenient and comfortable.
Be careful stepping down there. While everyone is getting settled up here,
we're going hear from speakers on eight themes in a lightning talk concept.
It's meant to be three or four minutes to impart a lot of information
quickly to sort of set the stage.  After this session, we want to hear from
the audience.  Eight themes are a lot to have eight break-out sessions.  We
will do a rapid fire voting, and my colleague, Justin, will help facilitate
that.  No pressure, Justin, to down select, if you will, another standards
term, the five top themes that people want to have break-outs around based
on what you're hearing today. We'll go through two rounds of lightning
talks here quickly, and then we'll get into that voting stage.

>> MODERATOR: Now to Christopher.

>> CHRISTOPHER: There are a vast array of businesses on supply and demand
side, but no one is collecting data on them, or if they are, it's done in
an idideosynchratic way.  I believe it's important to focus in on metrics
that will deliver the kinds of comparisons that we need to make in order to
make... to help ministries, investment banks and other financial
institutions and people who are bombarded by people's claiming their
technology or their approach is the greatest new thing for connecting more
people to the internet to make some sense of that, to actually understand
the situations, the context in which you will use this technology versus
that technology and to understand basically how effective they are.  That's
why we are leading an effort called one world connected and it explains why
I'm wearing orange converse tennis shoes and not wearing a tie.      A
whole bunch of issues are being posed in terms of gathering data.  The need
for baseline metrics.  You need to have people in the projects before to
understand what the difference is to get a before snapshot as well as an
after snapshot.  The need to tie metrics not just to connectivity but to
sustainable development goals as mentioned earlier. Health care, education,
because we...  the internet lovers tend to think of it as a value in itself
and we forget that it is instrumental to other values. Vast number of other
problems. Confidentiality.  It's hard to get people who have the data to
release it.  The need for independent verification.  All of these are
problems that can be solved, but they are difficult ones.  We're trying to,
with a university-based platform where we can do the verification and
confidentiality in ways that are helpful.  It remains a challenge and
developing the advanced metrics to measure the SDGs remains the biggest
challenge because that's where the scholars who are working after this
field for decades have yet to settle on a clear set of metrics.  I will
close by inviting you, we actually have a booth.  In booth number 1 in the
village if you want to learn more about the effort.  We do have coffee for
free from 9:00 in the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon.

>> MODERATOR: We will ask speakers to do about three speakers and then take
a few questions.  So now we will turn over to Paul on coordination on basic
digital skills training.

>> PAUL: It's this one? Okay.  So increasingly today's jobs require ICT
skills. Roughly half of all jobs today probably require ICT skills, and
this is expected to rise.  That means that it's critical that we focus on
insuring today's youth get the digital skills that they need to be
successful and productive.  Nigel asked where the bad news is, so here's
some. There's 149 million youth in the Latin region and less than 50% of
them finish high school.  One in five are neither working nor in school.
There's double the youth unemployment versus adult unemployment rate.  17%
live in poverty.  And the piece of good news is there are 6 million new IT
jobs in this region.  If that trend continues, it will be difficult for
countries in this region to compete on a global scale.  So there's many
focused on the issue of affordable access, and we will talk more about that
throughout the day. Driving down prices for connectiveness is great, but
it's not sufficient.  Even if connectivey prices are low, it has to be
addressed on several levels.  There's a bunch of factors that need to be
addressed over time starting with basic numeracy and literacy.  Some
include things like ensuring locally relevant content and services in the
local language, insuring services are accessible, ensuring a focus on women
and girls for gender equity. Developing proactive teacher training to
incorporate the use of ICTs throughout the education curricula rather than
as an afterthought.  Creating incentives for teachers to learn these as new
scales.  So these topics were all addressed at the recent global connect.
It was mentioned in the last session. Among the opportunities that were
noted for collaboration was acceleration across sectors. First coming to
recognition that there are really user skills and creator skills that we
talk about in the digital skills world where user skills are basic skills
to make use of commercial devices and applications and have the ability to
use them in a sort of sip call working environment, where creator skills
include programming capabilities and advanced content production. Not
everyone will be a coder, but everyone will need at least user skills.
There's already a WEMT of training curricula for user and creator skills
including content from internet society and also entities including
Microsoft.  We're focused on enabling inclusion. In Latin America we
collaborate closely with the trust for Americas and others.  And the
secretaries of youth in different countries.  Through these programs and
partnerships, we push for labor inclusion processes, IT skills development
specifically for youth and young women.  And at the policy level we're
supporting the adoption of youth policy recommendations including coding in
schools, special curricula and non-formal education in partnership with
UNESCO and OIJ. We're convinced this kind of collaboration is critical to
achieving long term success.  I look forward to taking questions in the
rest of the session today.

>> MODERATOR: The next topic is gender in the digital divide. Doreen?

>> D0REEN: I feel like the pressure is on here.  So last year as many of
you know in the plus 10 review and negotiations, we concluded that we fell
short one of the commitments that was made and that was the commitment on
achieving equal participation for women in the information society.  We
know that there's 250 million women offline.  We know that the gap is
growing. We know that that gap is bigger in least developed countries with
31%, and in Africa, 23%. And we know that 1.7 billion women in lower middle
income countries do not own a phone. So why does this mat sneer I'm going
to tell you briefly a little story.  I got to meet a founder of a program
based in Venezuela.  Iliana set up this center to provide ICT training to
women who had no education and to women that came from low income groups,
and to women that, in most cases, were subject to domestic violence. She
brought in these women.  She taught them ICT skills.  They had the
opportunity to receive counseling and support in other areas and so far she
has graduated 20,000 women that have gone on and be able to have this
experience as giving a lasting impact economically for all of these women.
This story shows that empowering women in the digital world impacts
economic opportunities, and leads to greater empowerment for women all over
the world.  We know that if we improve access to ICTs, if we provide the
necessary digital skills, we give tremendous opportunities and benefits
that can be amplified across society, benefit families, and societies as a
whole.  Bridging the digital gender gap is an economic imperative for the
world.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  Great story.  And the final speaker is Alex Wong.
Alex?

>> ALEX WONG: Should also let Doreen go last, too. Infrastructure.  So this
theme is money.  So 70 trillion dollars.  That's the amount of money that
sits in long-term investor's funds, looking to spend somewhere.  Many of
you know there's been a lot of discussion about getting more money into
general infrastructure.  This theme is about how can we direct some of that
money to ICT connectivity infrastructure?  I would argue that the low-
hanging fruit are done.  We've already made the progress to get us to the 4
billion connected so far.  The last 3.9 billion, and in particular the last
billion, there is no financial business model right now.  So the topic of
blended finance, and I'll read you that definition if some of you are not
familiar with it. It's defined as the strategic use of grants or grant
equivalent instruments together with non-grant financing from private and
or public sources to provide financing on terms that would make projects
financially viable or sustainable.  So this topic is about how can we
figure out how to connect into the 70 trillion plus dollars that are
sitting there looking for a home to be spent.  And of course the long-term
investors themselves. That's what we want to talk about.  How can we put
the infrastructure on the agenda of the long term investors? Right now it's
probably way down the list as compared to other infrastructure
opportunities, and I think that's what we want to talk more about how to do
that.  I'll give a final example of some of the work happening. It is an
organization that has been supported by the regional by laterals, trying to
create a data base of templates so that any owner can put into this system
the set of parameters that are needed to define an infrastructure project.
They so far have 35 templates.  Wed need to have enough level of detail
where a project owner could be all the parameters on this data base.  So
that's just one example of some of the stuff happening already where the
ICT infrastructure has to be added to some of these opportunities. Thanks.

>> MODERATOR: So that's the first four themes.  We have time for two
questions.  If you raise your hand, there's microphones in the room if you
have a question, please.  Is there a microphone there?

>> [ Question off mic phone ].

>> ALEX WONG: So the question alludes to the other way to promote more
investing is to lower the costs of the business case.  And the cost
equation touches on Nigel's comments which are all the taxes, I presume,
and all that the governments are putting on infrastructure.  I think we
should be more than happy to explore that as a side angle. That's a topic
on its own.  But it's a very good point.  We should look at that issue as
well.  It's not covered in one of the other topics right now is it?
Probably embedded in a lot of the topics, but we should absolutely explore
that more.

>> MODERATOR: We can get more questions?

>> I have a mic, so I will take advantage of that.  I'm from the
international association of libraries and institution, and I have a
question for Paul about digital skills.  What's particularly effective?
Where should we be looking to do this? I'm speaking from the spur...
perspective of where you're working towards?

>> PAUL: There are regular gathering places.  We have focused on schools,
libraries, health care institutions and public facilities as places for
connectivity.  The issue with skills training is how to make sure that you
get the right kind of instruction to the people who need it.  Which means
in the schools themselves seems like a super ideal place if you can start
it early enough.  If you...  we see this where we spent a lot of time
investing in working the curriculum with teachers and other partners and
getting teachers so they were comfortable using ICTs within the context of
the classes themselves.  That model seems to work.  That's a unique...
that's one situation in the world. At the same time, it's important and
it's also true in the Kenya scenario in that particular community, it's in
the schools and also a community hot spot.  Several of them.  And we've
made an effort oto try to make sure that connectivity is not just this
isolated thing.

>> CHRISTOPHER: I think Paul is being too modest.  Scores went up across
the board.  It was a dramatic impact.  That's one way to do it.  They have
seen improvement in scores in every grade evilly and every subject.  We're
collecting this data.  There's some suggestions about doing it in if
community based institutions.  There's suggestion that interactive is
better than static training. It's important to have sustaining efforts.
You need to have a way to connect to other people doing similar things to
leverage it out.  If it's a one-time shot it often doesn't have the depth
that it would otherwise have.

>> MODERATOR: On that note, we will switch to the sect panelists.  Please
join me in thanking them.

>> Mott MODERATOR: The next topic.

>> Thank you.  I co-founded the people-centered internet.  And the major
priority is that we step into this frontier, this new frontier and actually
do things because we don't understand enough about it to theorize about it.
We have to learn from practice.  In all of human history, a few moments
stand out which change human lives irrevocably.  When we stood upright.
When we discovered fire.  When we drew. Invented writing, discovered the
printing press, when we began organizing ourselves beyond the family unit.
We are at the brink of the next shift when all of humanity will be
connected to the internet.  No surprise, then, that one question as risen
to the top of the global agenda. Is it to be my tribe or our world?  Is it
better to close borders or to open minds and openly work in diverse
cultures and perspectives?  Encounters beyond diverse people will threaten
tightly held world views.  New connections threaten personal safety.  New
knowledge brings us to frightening frontiers that will take time to tame.
Advances in science, technology, and math can be faresomely destructive or
incredibly empowering. If we want to come together in the future, we have
to paint a path to the future clearly enough that everyone can see, touch,
taste, and feel it enough to want to create it together. The digital gap
working group has a commitment to work at the local community level.  It's
hard to get the local voices. So often we are sitting planning for people
whose daily lives are foreign to us.  So we're taking advantage of two
major networks that are out there at the local level.  The IEEE has members
in 160 countries.  The national federation of library associations has
320,000 public libraries.  They can provide a grid for us to tap into
what's going on at the local level, what they care about, what the leaders
consider as priorities. We have to tap that knowledge. So in mapping the
gaps, we are recommending in our working group, that we tap the local
communities, start with them and what's important to them. Because that's
the only way we can sustainibly going ahead with the sustainable
development goals. [ Applause ]

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  On the topic of the sustainable development goals
are Dominique.

>> DOMINIQUE: I'm happy to be here on behalf of my colleagues and the
members of the GSMA who work on a number of projects with so many partners
here in addressing a number of the issues that you've already heard today.
But I will be talking specifically about measuring, basically, impact.  And
the GSMA launched an impact in February or March, actually, on SDG impact.
And specifically, we looked at sort of four specific areas of measurement
in targeting.  And we looked at target filtering, which had 169 different
targets including economic targets as well as policy, investment and things
like that. We also looked at drivers and what drivers were important in
delivering different aspects of SDGs.  We identified 110 different drivers
from sort of all over from different industries and from direct and
indirect impacts as well.  We did an assessment on the drivers, and we
didn't just look at the mobile industry, which obviously is very much
important to our view, but we also looked at the other industries that play
an important role in conjunction with the mobile industry on driver
assessment. And finally we looked a metric identification and measurement.
So we looked at 90 countries where we could have a look at the different
SDG targets. We developed baseline scores and did a number of
methodological approaches and different imputs to it.  But one thing that
came out of this is though this report was the first report on this, what
we're hoping to do and I'm hoping to get your feedback, is we're hoping to
build up a set of impact assessments over the many years based on a number
of different things and our methodology will change behind that.  But,
accelerating the impact, we noted out of all of this, requires three
different things.  And I think we've talked quite a lot about it already.
We heard about scaling networks.  The investment for creating connectivity
and actually scaling it and making it quicker.  As well as access to
delivering inclusion as Paul mentioned earlier as well, through education.
We looked at innovating core technologies and services and realizing that
acceleration of this is going to be quite key in order to deliver on the
SDGs, and finally the development of policy as well as partnerships as we
heard earlier.  These were all key things that came out of that. Finally,
just out of our report and thinking about how to look at SDGs and measuring
the impact, we committed as a mobile industries along with a number of
other industries to develop a bigger road map with a focus on humanitarian
assistance initially, but just over all to work closely with them. To
become an advocate for reporting annually throughout a variety of different
places on SDG impact and to use the convening power of organizations to
continue to talk about this. So that is my perspective in terms of SDG
impact monitoring, and I'm happy to answering questions and I look forward
to talking with all of you further.

>> MODERATOR: The next theme is E government services.

>> Thank you, Michael.  I would like to share three trends that we observed
through our survey. Since we started looking at E governments in 2003.  The
first is integration.  We witnessed integrationed edintegrationed...
integrated services.  In 2003, most were mainly listings of websites. Now,
more than 90 countries provide partners.  Much progress is also seen...
which is integrated online of mobile services.  More than 50% of countries
have some form of this.  Through business license applications across
sectors.  My second point of second part is on inclusion.  More governments
including the least developed countries now bring services specific to how
the poorest and different segments of the population.  This ranged from
helping women to find domestic jobs, monitoring agricultural crop prices,
encouraging students to participate in open data hack-a-thon, among others.
Governments are doing more from consultation in spending in urban
developments to solving community problems among local authorities.
Inclusion ranges to digital for all.  The last 10% in advanced country like
Denmark or to provide basic online service through digital offices
everywhere. Last is emerging of intelligent online services. From the use
of check boxes to provide personalized intelligence.  This increasing
sophistication of digital services are embraced in concepts of smart
cities.  But just discussion of Schuhli ... challenging issues.  The least
developed countries are still lagging behind.  Provided integrated
inclusive intelligent approach, privacy of personal data to cyber security,
technical difficults across agency sagencies, lack of digital skills.
Moving forward, government needs to ask the hard questions. Not just how
many services we can put online but also how often the services are used.
And not just increasing the number of users, but leaving no one behind in
pursuing digital government and development.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  Now last but not least, the youth perspective.
Talking about youth and connectivity from the youth observatory.

>> Good afternoon.  Well, I want to talk about youth and connectivity.  I'm
sorry.  I'm going to start saying youth is shaping the internet but how and
why?  I can tell you about great examples such as Facebook created by
college students.  Or a girl that I just met.  She came out from...
teaches while talking about her heritage. Some of us were born connected,
so-called digital natives.  But others can still access the internet as we
know it.  How is youth affected by the lack of connectivity?  We have
examples in many areas. They don't have time to do it. They have to work
for the family and don't have time to do this. In Brazil N  in the Amazon
there are networks set up to connect. Even if they have a cell phone, they
can play Pokemon go, because Googles maps don't map the streets in their
area.  So they can't play. How are we accessing the internet?  We have this
problem and we have to prioritize the mobile world. We should raise
awareness. Especially about the youth who doesn't read.  How can I say it?
They don't have the education, how someone said in the first table.  How
can we help the youth?  There is a youth of youth initiatives who are here.
They are here, like the one that I'm a part of.  So what can be done?  We
want to connect those who are not connected, the young people who are not
connected.  I want to talk to you about this and hear what you have to say
to me.  Thank you. [ Applause ]

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much for that perspective.  We want to make sure
everyone including the people that we think of as digital natives that they
can become digital natives.  So thank you for that.  So again we have time
for two questions, and then we will have the hard task of choosing five out
of these themes to do break-outs on.

>> Thank you.  I want to just share quickly the perspective of central
Asia.  It is a region which is land-locked.  It's most far located from the
sea.  It's very mountainous.  Highest countries in the world.  It's in a
difficult neighbor.  So as a result, we have very expensive internet, which
is expensive in absolute terms and in relation to income.  It's unreliable
and it's very slow.  But what I found out is that we, in the region and
probably in other developing regions, too, live in oblivion.  Unknown
unknowns.  We don't know how bad the internet is.  We did a study, and the
first one a year ago, and just then realized the situation with the
internet in the region.  I think using this opportunity, I would call on
the international organizations in the community. Realizing these
challenges that we face.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: I thank you for that.  Another question?

>> I might say something about that.

>> MODERATOR: Please.

>> I think the people's republish of china initiative is a tremendous
opportunity for central Asia.  And if the global community can work out how
to take advantage of that, there's an anticipated $48 trillion to be
invested in the one belt one road, plus the maritime roads. I have spoken
with the IEEE smart village people, and they're excited about what we can
do locally.  Imagine the new silk route, which could have internet kiosks
all along the way.

>> MODERATOR: One more question? Okay.  Great.  We'll go to the voting.
First, again, please join me in thanking the four speakers. [ Applause ]

>> This is where you all get to decide how this is going to go. It's a
shame that we're going to have to kick three of these topics off the
island.  So, what I will do...  you know what? I'm going to take the
facilitator's prerogative.  I heard two loud rounds of applause.  One for
gender and the digital divide.  And the second for youth and connectivity.
Does everybody agree that they should be immune and move on?  Do you agree?
Come on, they were great. [ Applause ] The first one, improving data for
internet inclusion.  Give a round of applause if you would like to have
that as a break-out group?  Okay.  The next is coordination on basic
digital skills training. [ Applause ] Okay.  Next we have infrastructure
development and impact investing for connectivity. [ Applause ] Okay.  The
next is mapping gaps for connect to thrive.  Round of applause if you would
like to break into that one?  Okay. You're off the island.  The next is
sustainable development goals impact framework. [ Applause ] Okay.  You're
off the island, too.  Next is E government services.  I think we have our
top three. [ Speaking off mic ].

>> Read them off.

>> MODERATOR: Improving data for internet inclusion, Christopher.
Coordination on basic digital skills training, Paul, and impact investing
for connectivity with Alex. This may change the votes. [ Laughter ]

>> KAREN McCABE: So how we're going to work this, it's a little bit of a
tight room.  So bear with us as we arrange everyone.  The lightning talk
speakers on those topics will be the facilitators of those discussions.  We
will just sort of do it in order at the tables. I will let Justin handle
that difficult task.

>> JUSTIN: We're going to do this.  Clearly we have tables and we can't
move them.  I'm going to walk down and ask everybody in one row to turn
their chairs around.  The thing is this.  I know people want to go to
different things.  So we're going to have to do this very quickly.  I'm
going to need you to turn your chairs around before you go.  I'm going to
go down the rows and I will come back up and identify the topics. So we're
going to skip this row right here.  So I'm going to ask this row right
here, get up, turn your chairs around.  This row right here?  Same here,
get up and turn your chairs around. You work them and get them to do it.
And these rows right here. So what we're going to do, these back two rows,
that is going to be youth and connectivity right here.  If you want to join
that group, be at one of these two tables, okay? Who do we have here?  Do
you mind just guiding and making sure that everybody goes where they're
supposed to go? Okay.  The next one is... what was the next one?

>> I don't know what the last one was.

>> JUSTIN: Gender gaps at this table right here.  And then we have
improving data for internet inclusion in these two rows right here.  And
then we'll do investment in these two rows. Yep.  And then the mapping gaps
up over there.  Yes.  And now you all have, as Karen mentioned, the
individuals who spoke earlier are going to be leading the groups.  So, get
going and come up with some results. [ Break out sessions ].

>> KAREN McCABE: As you get into your discussion groups, what we're asking
is to look at it from three perspectives. What are the challenges or work
that needs to be done around that theme.  One is what are the opportunities
that are there? Any success stories that you might hear about those
particular themes, and the other is thinking in terms of who would be
involved?  Who might be missing from that topic?  Who do we need to have at
the table to help us get to that solution? So it's looking at it from
challenges, opportunities, real work going on in that space as well as who
and what and where needs to be involved so we can add that to the road map.
Thank you.

[ Break-out sessions ].

>> Hi everyone.  This is your two-minute warning.  Pull out your main
themes and identify who your spokesman for your group will be and we'll be
hearing from each group in about five minutes.  Thank you.

>> So we hit that time.  Can each group send your spokesman? Each group's
person please come to the podium.  Michael, you win the prize for getting
there first.

>> Hi.  Everyone.  We're going to get started.  I think we're missing one
break-out group.  If you're that person, come to the table.  Hi everyone.
Thank you for being part of the various discussions on the five things that
were selected for more deep conversation.  And with that, we're going to
hear from each of the group s.

>> So we divided on four questions and we tried to answer some of them.  We
have like people from Mexico and Lebanon. So we tried to get some
experiences and see which we had in common.  Our access to knowledge is not
good if you don't have access to the internet.  This could be something
really bad. Socialability, being a young person, you don't know where the
parties and the meetings and social events.  In some cultures like in
Lebanon there are bigger problems in connectivity like war and troubles
with refugees and this kind of stuff.  We discover...  not discover, but we
find out, we use most social networks.  We can have troubles with future
bubbles and fake news and who shapes our talks and what we do in our lives.
We have who affects our privacy. Access is limited by current issues like
the disrespect to the net neutrality principle. So we only can access to
some products, some platforms that may not be good.  So, are young people
better prepared to deal with the internet? We are digital natives, but we
don't have too much digital literacy.  So we have this lack of digital
literacy that could harm our views on the internet. We are shaping the Behr
snit, as I said.   Internet, as I said. Maybe we can do these things on our
houses and universities, but when it comes to policymaking, we are like,
not represented. We tried to find some solutions on this, like parenting.
Try to teach the parents to talk to the kids, talk to their children. And
also try to use the libraries on digital literacy. Try to give them a new
role. Someone said like in Mexico, they do...  they use Wikipedia to create
local content, hack-a-thons.  And how can young people get involved with
policymaking?  There are Os already that have these programs for the next
generations and young people.  And also empowerment through youth
organizations created by young people and who are directed by young people.

>> I don't know if the group benefitted from the switch, but I did: I
thought it was a great discussion that we had and I'll spend a little bit
of time talking about it.  So we divided the unconnected into two groups.
First the ones who could get access if they wanted to.  Maybe they live in
the cities or in connected areas.  Maybe it's affordable.  But they have
just chosen not to.  And a lot of surveys say that some people just don't
see the interest or have the skills.  So for that group, we talked about
increasing demand, focusing on demand and creating the business case
through increasing the demand to create the need for investment because the
more demand, the more it will be used and obviously then people can make
the business case themselveses to invest in those regions as people go
online. And then we talked about the regions like we heard in the
mountainous regions, the high cost regions, maybe with low population
density.  It's hard to build demand where there's no access.  So here we
talked about first creating sharing modelled to get some access in the
villages so that people can connect.  We talked about community and access
to help set up the networks.  Very low cost tools in these regions just to
start to create the demand and make the business case using different
technologies.  Maybe satellite and other technologies to serve.  Then we
talked about another model that if the government is delivering a lot of
services into those regions and it's quite expensive they can save
significant money by delivering those services online rather than through
more physical means, try to make the case for that, take those savings and
investing them up front so that the government becomes the anchor tenant
for this network that over the long term they will save money from being
able to use.  And of course that creates the demand, because those services
that are delivered online have to be received online.  So if it's paycheck
or other services, people will go online through these shared networks to
use them.  And finally, had an example to help increase outside investment
where they had small projects where they just didn't have the scale or the
risk. Bundle them together under a portfolio of projects.  So you get a lot
of scale and you reduce the risk by spreading it out over a number of
projects and increase the investment that way.  And eventually you will
have a nice portfolio of projects that will be invested and sustainable by
bundling them together. So that was our read-out. Thank you.

>> We were talking about data and getting the challenges.  We took it very
literally.  I will take it in challenges, opportunities, and who should be
involved in taking the charge literally.  But we're always looking to
leverage existing data sets, but it's much harder than you this.  If you
wonder why to compare the data collected, it just varies, and you have to
unravel that.  It may require sampling and validation to try to make it
work better.  The other thing that's said is there are certain kinds of
data that are harder to gather.  Someone asked about legal impediments.
Some laws are very easy to study.  They are broad brush.  Some require a
great deal of analysis to understand what they are. Another person
commented we are short on impact data and what is comparable.  There is a
tendency to want to become more specific. But at that point, countries and
regions vary in terms of what is appropriate.  Finding the way to do that,
clustering different types of countries.  It may be helpful.  Getting
private companies who have a great deal which is very difficult.  It may be
something that you have to find.  There are some examples of that as you
can talk about. Privacy puts restrictions on reuse of data.  You can't just
casually grab a data set and use it.  Opportunities, there are a bunch of
opportunities which are useful.  Locations of cell towers, broadcast their
existence.  Data on rights of way and on repairs to roads and digging
trenches is potentially shareable.  Local data, they're talking about some
examples that divides the country into grids with population densities put
on to them.  There are a number of commercial mapping applications. We
should be involved.  Most of the discussions about local communities as the
best source of data and some individuals are very interested in it.  It was
common that that's hard to generalize globally because leaders will vary.
Private companies will have a lot of data.  They can only get government
imposed op ligations. They will only do it if it's in their interest.  But
the hope is to expand beyond the traditional notion of civil society.
These are people who actually travel the field and have a great deal of
experience about what conditions are.  We want ICT.

>> D0REEN: So our group was the gender group.  We actually didn't have
gender balance.  We had more men than women in our group, so thank you very
much to the men that joined us. [ Applause ] We had lots of ideas and we
concluded that there is no quick fix to this issue.  Because it's more than
just giving a woman access to the internet or giving a woman a mobile
phone.  It's the entire eco-system.  And we noted that clearly the gender
digital divide is widest where gender empowerment is lowest. Or having
access to ICTs.  We also noted in our discussion about challenge s we also
noted that the media is also, perhaps not doing enough, and that the role
of the media is key if we want to get out there and start to change
perceptions and mindsets.  And we noted that we don't want to turn boys
into girls, but we do want girls to understand that there's lots of
opportunities out there. It was also noted that some of the things that are
keeping women offline?  Affordability is an issue.  Lack of relevant
content sometimes.  In terms of opportunities, the opportunities are huge.
Imagine a world where we get women more involved in technology could
perhaps completely change the face of our devices.  So the impacts are huge
and they do cut across all sectors of the economy.  Just one statistic from
last year. They mentioned that increasing the number of women working in IT
could generate an extra 2.6 billion pound  pounds each year. We need to be
bottom up and Tom down.  We need to get everyone involved. Education has a
huge role to play.  Cedrick, we're counting on you.  We need policymakers
to be involved.  We need the ICT industry.  We need the media. We noted
that perhaps we could encourage projects to have a specific gender
requirement, ICT related projects.  Maybe that could be considered and if
you want funding, you have to have some gender requirement in there.  We
also noticed that countries that actually have gender in their national
broadband plans are improving. They're doing better.  So that's something
that we can encourage all countries to do in their national broadband
plans. We definitely need more data.  We need to work more closely with
you, Chris, because we need to show concretely impact based how ICTs really
can make a difference in the lives of women and girls around the world.
Finally I informed my colleagues that we have a session on Friday where we
will be talking about equals. It's a multi-stakeholder initiative that
seeks to address the digital gender divide.

>> And it has a secret sign, too.

>> D0REEN: Yep.

>> So digital skills working up from the end of the discussion. It was
really clear that if people don't see any value, they're not going to worry
about building the skills.  So a big part of this challenge is helping
people understand what's in it for them.  People who are unaware of what
access to digital infrastructure and skills and opportunities can mean for
them.  We noted there was quite a discussion about sort of the socio-
cultural challenges where women and girls may not have access because they
are forbidden from having access or they are beaten if they, you know,
attempt.  We just note that all of these issues are actually really
intertwined.  So you can't just sort of solve for one point you have to
recognize that there's a reaction in all parts of the sort of skilled eco-
system, or the user eco-system that will happen as people increasingly
achieve these skills.  It's noted that one of the things we need to talk
about and develop plans for is actually media and information literacy
skills, which also have an ethical dimension to them.  We talk about
learning coding skills or, you know, creator skills, which I called them
before, and user skills referencing the ability to sort of use devices.
But on top of that there's a need to develop information literacy so people
can make appropriate choices and understand what they're seeing and how to
put it into context of what they're reading and how to put it into context
with the real world. That's a very topical issue these days given the fake
news stories, for example, that are floating around the internet today. We
had some examples of existing programs and European commission programs for
essentially training on how to be safe on the internet, which is related to
the media and information literacy.  An example was just a program focused
on connecting all the schools and where they didn't have necessarily
competent teachers locally to actually use distance learning via the
connected schools to actually help out. We also spent a bit of time talking
about public libraries as one approach that can really scale.  Communities
have libraries.  Librarians or people who are staffed at libraries, this is
sort of within their skill set to sort of drill down into how to use these
technologies and be sort of a focus for communities in taking advantage of
the connectivity and, you know, essentially communities, libraries as the
center of some communities can really be a place that can develop scale. We
also talked about the use of mobile devices for training. So, club
internet.  An example of an onboarding experience that comes along with
devices and in partnership to get people up to basic mobile skills.  And
then the first, working from the end to the beginning, the first comment
was really you need to focus on training trainers first.  And there's
several examples of that in context. And anything I missed out, I assume
somebody else in a group will mention later.

>> Thank you.  We will move into our next segment on regional reports and
experiences that pepper from Facebook will be facilitating for us.  Is
there anything that people from the break-outs maybe want to contribute
that wasn't said? Okay.  I think we're in good shape.  If you have notes
from your break-out sessions, send them to me.  And a round of applause,
please?  With that, I'm going to ask Pepper to come to the stage and our
regional group lightning talk speakers. I lost my train of thought there.

>> We are going to go ahead and get started.  So this part of the program
is going to be looking at regional examples. And I...  the idea here is
to... as Karen said when we started earlier this afternoon, to try to make
this as pragmatic as possible.  It's about how can we move the needle to
increase connectivity and adoption when it's available.  It's both about
the supply side as well as the demand side. So what we're going to do with
the regional break-out session.  It's not going to be a break-out in the
same way. Karen and I sort of talked a little bit.  We're very flexible.
So we're adapting. And what I'm going to do is ask my colleagues up here
who are from different regions of the world to provide some very concrete
examples where there have been projects that have increased connectivity
and adoption use and therefore benefits of being connected. It's always
important and good to know what does not work. It's all about lessons and
learned and being very pragmatic so that we can really move the needle and
move it quickly. After some quick lightning round comments and suggestions,
I then want to open it up to you because I expect that you, also, were
involved in this together. That you also have very specific and concrete
examples that you can provide.  At the end of this, what would be great if
s if we all have lessoned learned that others can learn from and that can
feed into the projects that we heard about earlier on the opening panel.
So with that, I thought what we would do is start...  let's start with
Africa.  Right?  A for Africa. Alliance for affordable internet, a terrific
organization.  And they really have been making a difference. So why don't
you start off. That would be great.

>> Wonderful.  So I'll start with a quick overview of where we stand with
numbers in Africa. Approximately 25% of people are online, and those who
are not online tend to be women, those living in poverty, and rural
populations.  Through a study we did at the foundation, we found that poor
women are 50% less likely to access the internet than men in the same
communities.  As far as internet growth usage in Africa last year, we only
saw about 4% increase.  What is causing all of this?  The high cost has
been mentioned as one big barrier. Income inequality does play a role and
tends to make progress look faster than it actually is. And device cost is
a hurdle. We believe through strong leadership emerging from governments,
we can start closing the digital divide and even the gender digital divide.
We need to smash the affordability barrier and drive down prices through
good policymaking.  The first global coalition with over 80 member
organizations representing the private sector, governments and civil
society.  Working at tackling high prices.  Our mission is to reduce the
cost of basic broadband connection to enable hundreds of millions of people
to connect.  We have a very ambitious target.  We are actually pushing for
the adoption of a new target, which is that one gigabyte of mobile
broadband should not cost more than 2% of average monthly income or what we
call the one for two target.  If we don't take that it will take us until
2040 to come close to closing the divide. So we're focused on driving
policy and regulatory change. It's action focused and using a blend offed a
vow Kay is, research and coalitions.  We have strong coalitions in many
areas in Africa.  And in each country, a local coalition that identifies
key barriers and works together to figure out how best to do that.  We have
seen great success stories in Nigeria and Ghana where prices have been
slashed and groups are able to challenge regulations and strong capacity to
challenge regulations or laws in place that are causing the cost of access
to remain high. Under the web foundation, we have a broader program called
the digital inclusion program. We're working with actors and policymakers,
governments and private and civil society actors to specifically address
the gender digital divide.  It was great to hear that maybe one of the
proposals should be for my programming initiative, that should be a way to
ask.

>> MODERATOR: You mentioned real success in Nigeria and Ghana. Can you talk
about those?  One of the things you mentioned was the ability for citizens
and civil society to engage in the process and complain.

>> Not just complain but engage. For instance, in Nigeria, there's a strong
concerted campaign, and we have a great info graph story about how that
worked.  They were able to speak with the communications regulator, if you
will.  And lobby with numbers.  Especially women to get online.  Through
that kind of coalition approach, the big win for the coalition group there.
Even in Ghana, actually T government was finally able to slash taxes on a
value-added tax on mobile phones which were being considered luxury goods.

>> MODERATOR: One example, reduce taxes.

>> Because we are able to show specifically which groups are harmed if we
continued taxing mobile phones and other devices as though they are luxury
goods. Through research and advocacy and policy engagement, being able to
show who is hurt by these measures.  That's been a big win.  Trying to
bring all of these accesses to the same place.  Various regulators don't
know what they're doing.  To really engage with the actors to see what
things look like on the ground.

>> MODERATOR: That's great. Very concrete.  Asia?  It's on.

>> Okay.  Really, Asia is... Asia's success will not come as a surprise to
anybody.  It's because markets have worked. It's because competition has
worked.  It is stuff that everyone is talking about 30 years ago.  Where we
have failed is where markets have not worked.  Why we have huge amounts of
retail level competition.  Prices are among the lowest in the world.
Meeting the barrier, we still are looking at 20 to 30% of our populations
in any given country being online.  So that's very low.  It has not given
access to the internet.  And where we have failed, as I said where markets
aren't working specifically has to do with the backside of things.
Wholesale prices are still monopoly controlled.  We don't have fiber
networks that go across to most countries. And what you see is the state
entering a La Australia with national broadband plans and failing
miserably. The governance structures which don't involve private sector
participation have also failed in universal service funds.  If you at least
have private sector actors, they have been somewhat effective.  The
government has managed to take over large universal service funds and not
spend it.  So the state is part of the problem. It also doesn't help that
countries increased taxes on mobile services at the retail level.  We now
pay 42% taxes on our mobile bill.  And yet at the same time the government
goes and gives its biggest allocation to ICT sector development for
government services and rolling out networks.  So I think they're confused
whether it's a demerit good or a merit good. We also see from, let's say,
India.  There are lots of local communities and actors.  What they need is
some kind of connectivity that they should be able to buy from the existing
operator.  Which surprisingly, if they say I've got a village of 1,000
people and I can pay you this much, just give me connectivity, the first
question is what are you going to use it for.  In fact they should be like
thank you, you're a new customer right?  So what happens is unless you
operate in multiple states and can buy in bulk, you actually don't even get
it in your village, and that's a problem.  You need a license and they
don't have the money to bid.  They would really not cause harm and they run
temporary networks which creates the market for them to enter. Now mobile
phone on a ship. So the stark contrast is people who own a smart phone, so
Mayanmar, the most recent country to get connected, about a year ago, 66%
of the people who had phones had a smart phone, right?  The numbers on
internet access are related.  At that time with 66% smart phone ownership,
45% were daily active users of the internet.  Now that number as doubled.
So the phone makes a huge difference.  And because India, Sri Lanka, all of
these countries, we still have a huge stock of feature phones. We never
throw things away.  So we need to get it out of the handsover people and
get a smart phone in their hands. There are no outlaws of zero rating like
freebasics from Facebook.  A huge uptick of higher uses of data.  I think
we would call for a nuanced approach, not a principled approach.

>> MODERATOR: So smart phone ownership is really interesting. In Mayanmar
they didn't have anything.  They didn't have old phones to keep, right?
They are almost entirely smart phones and they have a completely different
pricing arrangement.  Voice is free, data is free.  Or text.

>> And these things will be game-changers.

>> MODERATOR: Is there something from a policy perspective that could drive
smart phone adoption?

>> Lower taxes, specifically. These are still luxury goods in almost all
the countries that we look at.  And if you want targeted mechanisms, so
let's say for low-income women, you can have targeted subsidies. But
generally, low taxation will help a huge amount.

>> MODERATOR: One of the things that Paul is very involved in is spectrum
use in access.  So, when we get to you, you may want to do the north
America part. Even if it's licensed, let somebody else use it.  There's
different ways of thinking about getting it into use.

>> And also kicking off like military and the broadcasters. For example, in
India, who hold the most valuable spectrum.

>> I don't think thatdom nick is here anymore.  But she probably would
agree strongly that in fact, this is a problem across Asiaa...  so Africa,
Asia, I'm going to go alphabetical. Nigel?  Europe.  You're going to have
to actually...  you didn't think I was going to call on you.  You probably
were doing e-mail.  And N will come last.

>> NIGEL: Talking about Europe is interesting because Europe is fortally
and unfortunately for Europe, quite advanced in terms of the mobile
penetration and the take-up of services.  But what I would like to
characterize in the next couple of minutes in terms of what Europe has been
doing is a bit in terms of the good, bad, and the ugly.  In the mid 90s,
the frame work for telecommunications in Europe has provided a guidance, a
framework in which countries work within. And has dramatically enhanced
competition and provision of services across European countries.  I think
that is the good.  And we've seen the take-up of economic regulation in
many parts of the world partly because of the example shown by Europe. The
penetration masks a good deal of the variance.  For example F we're talking
about enhanced broadband penetration, coming to the top of the list with
fast broadband. Development has naturally been slower because of the
transition effects.  So I think that is the good news in that Europe has
been able to, through the enlightened framework has been able to, if you
like, bring countries forward in terms of penetration.  But it's not all
good news.  Because in terms of some of the countries, there are problems.
There are price disparities.  For instance, in some countries in eastern
Europe, the price of the mobile broadband package is much higher than it is
in other areas, so we're seeing a correlation between the price of
broadband and the take-up of course.  Also in terms of regulatory
intervention where markets clearly are not working.  In terms of spectrum
allocation, there's been differences in spectrum allocation of having a
common approach to spectrum allocation where, if you like, have a regulate
aid preach led by a European regulator. Going from the industry, a transfer
of money going into the hands of the government.  And there hasn't been a
consistent approach across Europe.  So I think, you know, I think the
picture, as I say, is mixed. And finally, although we're talking here about
access as we were reflecting on earlier, a lot of the...  a lot of access
and a lot of take-up of broadband services, of course, depends, to an
extent, on a number of other factors.  We come back to the skill level
here.  We come back to the education.  We come back to some of the effects
of cyber-security legislation, privacy, and data protection legislation.
And I think you have to look at those issues as well in terms of how a
country is progressing.  And of course now in Europe we are seeing an
increased regulatory approach on cyber-security and also on lawful access
to information.  Will that in itself affect the take-up rates?

>> MODERATOR: So you mentioned some of the high prices in the central or
eastern European countries.  That's suppressing take-up.  There's price
sensitivity.  As an observer for a long time of those issues, why do you
think the prices are higher in eastern Europe than in western Europe?  And
is that the case for both fixed as well as mobile broadband?

>> I think mobile broadband is probably a special case.  And I think some
of the fixed line costs reflect some of the infrastructure issues that, you
know, some European countries have had in rolling out.  I'm not suggesting
that won't change over time, but I think, you know, there is a is an
example taking place.  Certainly the European picture is mixed in this
respect.

>> MODERATOR: That makes me think of Christopher working on all of his
data.  Within Europe, there's kind of control.  I think in terms of data,
it's really interesting.

>> Yeah.  Also there's a wider aspect here.  Obviously this is nothing to
do with ICANN at all, but we did sponsor a study back in 2013 that looked
at the various factors that encouraged GDP growth in particular ICT
statuses.  It was greatly affected by broader policies and how transparent
the government was.  How they were running and how they were providing
public services through ICT issues and tax issues as well.  I think there
are broader issues at play here.

>> MODERATOR: Latin America and Caribbean?  Right?

>> Right.  I'm going to follow-up on Nigel's comment about variance in
Europe and argue that maybe Latin America's not a useful unit of analysis
when you have such variance between countries.  Just to give an example, on
average in Latin America we have 40 fixed broadband subscriptions per 100.
So that's about half. So the connectivity solutions and the problems in
Bolivia are completely different.  And of course we have enormous variance
within the countries.  Latin America is a complex region.  And within the
countries.  The most interesting development that we have seen in the last
decade has been a shift from purely market-based approaches to connectivity
to a more realistic and nuanced mix of marketing center for fiber operators
and promotion of community initiatives and also large public investments in
connectivity. Community initiatives, there's too many to list.  But one
interesting example is here in Mexico.  He dweebed a bottom-up approach to
cell phone operator.  It's one tower cell phone operator operated by the
community, reusing spectrum from the operators who were not interested in
reaching that communitycommunity.  For a number of years governments saw it
as a bit of a nuisance.  We had universal service fund and that will take
care of it.  They do add to the mix.  There has been three types of large
public investments.  First, of course, you have the big investments in
infrastructure.  That is extending fiber networks outside the main
metropolitan areas. Most large countries in Latin America are doing that in
one way or another.  This is just about to be implemented next year.  The
injury is still out on those initiatives.  What I find interesting is that
despite all the changes in government, despite all the changes in the
electoral shifts in Latin America from more left lean ing we see that
governments have recognized that they are an important component of the mix
of initiatives. They have, for the most part, failed.  Here's an
interesting question.  Have initiatives failed?  Or have we failed to
recognize where the impact has been?

>> How do you define failure failure.

>> The easiest way is to look at standardized test scores and basically
none of them have shown any gains in standardized tests.  There is some
positive outcomes.  And the newest type of initiative is the initiatives to
promote demand.  Skills and in general, literacy.  And there's many
initiatives, nothing at the very large scale, but they're starting to be
sponsored by the government. The evidence is showing that more and more
people are saying that typically people say why are not not connected in
Latin America?  It's always cost. When you track the numbers, they have
been steadily falling.  The people who say I can't connect because I can't
afford it.  And more and more people are saying I'm just not interested.  I
don't have the skills.  I'm concerned about security or privacy.

>> MODERATOR: Let's definitely come back to defining success and failure.
Let's see.  After L we have M.  My former colleague from Cisco way back
when, when we were working on national broadband network for reconciliation
in Lebanon.

>> Yes.  So thank you.  It is a region that is not homogenous, so the
penetration is on average, 40% of households. However you have the GGC
countries scoring over 75% penetration, while Yemen, Syria, Libya, you
know, all the other countries being way below 40%. So there is a lot of
young people in the middle east.  105 million of them between the ages of
15 and 29.  And the unenemployment rate is 30%. What has worked in Lebanon,
Egypt, and Jordan Jordan is that the internet has worked.  You have young
people self-organizing themselves and bringing up new innovations,
photographs, etc.  To create enterprises using the internet that has worked
as I said in the three countries.  This is a tremendous count, with 30%
unemployment and very highly poll lowized religiously population.  You can
see that people with no work can make a lot of them.  The second thing that
didn't really work in the middle east is the multi-stakeholers.  Why?
Because they're not really stakeholders.  In order to have stake you have
to have money, interest, skin.  In middle eastern population, even though
61% of those interviewed said they could not live without internet.  Only
less than half of them actually use the internet to purchase a book or
anything.  So we have these users that don't have any stake in economic
gain from the internet.  So they don't really...  either they're not
organized and they don't demand anything because they are just passive
users. That brings us to the third failure in the middle east, which is the
role of the government.  The governments need to protect the people. They
have to do the addresses in a certain amount of time.  They want to do
everything.  They want to do everything.  This is actually suffocating the
with the government's role to be so pervasive, so the governments maybe
need to look at the problem differently.  They have to concentrate on
growth instead of control.  We're not there yet, but that's an opportunity
for governments to move that way.  And finally what has worked, so we have
two and two here is I  IXP deployment in the region.  They had to do the
supply.  More can be done there to reach the maturity level.

>> MODERATOR: Great.  We're going to come back to that.  You say
suffocating in some respects, some of those are in those that are high
penetration. So dive into that.  What are some of the things that actually
have worked in some of the countries not with standing that has resulted in
better adoption?

>> That's a good question.  I think GCC succeeded in rolling out the
networks.  It's all government money.  So the governments of the GCC
countries deployed the networks.

>> But government as operator in those countries?

>> Later on they left it.  But it's government money that has been
privatized.  That worked well.  Lebanon is different.

>> So again, just like in Latin America, we have labels about regions, but
they are extraordinarily diverse.

>> Exactly.

>> Which brings us to north America.  So that basically north America is
Canada and U.S. Are you going to include Mexico? Or we have already
included Mexico.  So a much less diverse region.  Just two countries.

>> Just two countries, but a lot of land area.  Both Canada and the United
States have some of the best infrastructure in the world, but connectivity
for those living on reservation is poor or non-existent.  This estimates
that about 34 million people lack access in the United States.  In addition
to basic access gap, there's a homework connectivity gap that we're focused
on where students have access to connectivity at school but not at home.
That's usually due to cost not due to its unavailability.  But they can't
use the internet to complete their home work.  So these students fall
behind their peers.  And they, you know, there's a spiral that goes
downhill Fer there.   From there.  Where the need is greatest, there are
laws prohibited municipalities from building networks.  So the FCC tried to
preempt that but was overturned in the sixth circuit court this year.
Microsoft has put together a project, and the idea here...  this is one
hopefully successful project is to leverage the high speed broadband that
is already provided to schools.  So the challenge here, the idea was can we
extend the schools network to the area around the schools that covers the
students and it's still in compliance with all the rules that allow the
network to be funded in the first place? Students receive a device that
creates a personal hot spot in their home and connects to the school's
network.  The device is under the control of the network administration of
the school. So it does fulfill all the rules.  This particular project
takes advantage of a syntax from the past tobacco settlement money from
tobacco companies that were sort of fudging the results on cancer tests is
now being used to fund this program. This program will fund about 2,000
students and goes live in the early part of 2017, and we expect similar
projects to launch around the country. There's another one, Axiom
technologies, which is a small company in me, is working on a similar
project in Washington county, Maine.  We have a grant that you can compete
for.  Axiom won the grant last year. Another innovation is a policy
innovation that the FCC did, which is electing to expand the lifeline phone
subsidy to cover broadband.  So there is just the last week they announced
four initial providers of lifeline service that is going be covered by the
subsidy. Those populations without the necessary skills to take on the new
jobs and it's a challenge the U.S. needs to address.  Canada has similar
issues, different industries at stake but similar issues.  In the U.S.
there's 7.3 million fewer jobs for people with only high school education
than in 1989, but a doubling of jobs for those with a college degree in the
past 25 years.  Only 4310 of them offer advanced placement computer science
classes. We 'got economic opportunity and employment opportunity going like
this.  We have infrastructure that mostly solves the problems and we are
not solvng solving for the people to actually have those jobs. One way to
challenge this gap is to do it in the schools.  So one program that is very
successful, which is technology, education and literacy in schools
basically has trained professionals to team teach in high schools
throughout the United States.  The people are volunteers and they partner
with teachers and create a ripple effect which impacts the students they
teach. This demonstrates what you can do if you have a good idea and you're
one guy.  There's one guy named Kevin Wang in 2009 who wanted to do this
for his kids' school.  He was the volunteer. He got it going.  Now it's
part of Microsoft's global use program and it operates with thousands of
people across the United States.  So we have, you know, a couple of policy
things, a couple of technical things, and a couple of sort of people things
just to the question on spectrum.  It's basically using unused.  That's
great.  They cover the side circle around this school. ... More broadly on
the policy front, it's important that they stop thinging of it as a zero
sum game.  It's really about sharing a set of spectrum frequencies today.
And all of them, pretty much everything in this room is operating on
unlicensed frequencies.  That's part of the equation, too.  A little of
this and that and balance is what we would urge the policymakers to focus
on.

>> I'm looking at Karen.  We have five minutes.  We can go until five?  Ah.
So yeah, so we go until 5:00, so we have 20 minutes.  What I'm going to
do...  this doesn't...  this will...

>> I'm I'm going to wander around.  I don't know whether this is going to
be punishment for staying around or, you know, an advantage for staying
around. I am going to come to you if anybody has any additional ideas to
add in terms of concrete projects that have worked or not.  One thing that
actually has come up that...  there are different perspectives on it. Maybe
after we go to the floor, to come back, backhaul. Backhaul is a problem.
Identified the Africa. Virtually everywhere.  You talked about some of the
backhaul problems when governments have been involved. So can we maybe
tease out from our examples around the world of where is it working and
we're no?  A lot of the debate and discussion is about the last mile as the
barrier, when in fact, actually it's much less of the last mile.  Backhaul
middle mile is one of the biggest barriers to actually get broadband and go
beyond GSM voice.  Does anybody in the room have an additional project that
you have worked on or that you have seen that has made a difference in any
region in the world?

>> We have toyed with a few different approaches.  One that we like to
always speak about is one that we have done in Madagascar and one in
Burundi. In Burundi there was no backbone at all.  We had several mobile
operators and active mobile competition.  So we put them all together.  The
bank funded a subsidy to ask them to build the high traffic and rural
routes. The government stepped out and provided some seed capital and now
there's a backbone network that works very well.  It is basically self-
policing. Any other examples? Christopher.  Hold on.  I'll be right there.
I know we're making the camera guys crazy but that's okay.

>> It's fascinating.  There are interesting success stories that have some
positive metrics.  You mentioned very few school programs that have worked
in Latin America.  There is one that actually has in eight countries
reached 1 million students with satellite distributed video.  And they say
that it is improved test scores in every subject and grade level.  We have
to value Dade that information.  Especially with satellite distribution.
It's a cost effective way to improve linear video distribution.  It's a
particular form but potentially very helpful.  Eco-net wireless is doing
green field off grid cell tours.  They are trying to exband into India and
Uganda. They are powered by diesel and are sustainable right now.  And
importantly, they're adding refrigerators and they are distributing on the
cell tower-based stations, putting refrigerates to refrigerate fax seens.
Health ministers come running up and say how can I get this in my country.
It's a 3G standard cell-based station which they can make pay for itself
currently on those terms.  They are trying to do solar panels but you will
have problems with theft of solar panels.  There are interesting problems.
There is an Indian program that has done digital literacy that has
succeeded in training 900,000 people.  We don't know the ultimate pay off,
but it's rare to see numbers achieved on the order of 900,000 and a
million. At those numbers, modest benefits have a decent chance of paying
out.  There are more, but that's just headlines.

>> That's great.  Anybody else?

>> One of the benefits of having a school connected is the child learns how
to get on.  We know that the understanding about how to get on and use it
is part of relevance and also the skill set, the capacity building.  So the
child comes home and says at school, I'm on.  Number one. Every parent
wants their child to do well, so that creates relevance for connectivity in
the home, even if the parents don't have content for them, for their child.
That becomes important.  Second, the child can come home and teach their
parents and grandparents and siblings how to get on.  That's again, a
different outcome which is a knock on benefit from school connectivity
beyond the curriculum.  Just some thoughts. And also in terms of how do we
define success and failure.

>> Thank you for the question. I can confidently say that the more rigorous
evidence that we have today shows that those... the connectivity projects
at the school level have not made a difference on test scores.  And we have
partnered on this project.  We studied Chile and Peru and Uruguay and
Brazil.  So we started asking why is that? Maybe we are not looking in the
right place.  We have spillovers into the community, into family, adult use
and so on.  So we're going in that direction of the spillover direction.
There seems to be some evidence that this is happening. The more household
connectivity there is in that area, there's some evidence that spillover
does happen.  You have to reframe the projects.  It's about promoting
community development through school connectivity.  And the second route
we're taking is try to go beyond just that course. There's a few directions
here. What about school climate?  What if connecting schools improves the
learning environment?  So eventually you will get to the test scores.  We
see something in that direction.  So in general, we're trying to see how
can we broaden the measure of success beyond the test scores?

>> Right.

>> I just wanted to add to that. We, I think last year, we finished a
systematic review where we looked at the English literature on using ICTs
in the classroom setting.  Since I think, well, about 15 years of English
all published and non-published literature.  And part of the problem a lot
of the literature defines learning outcomes in this way that Christopher
and you have been talking about.  Does it improve standardized test scores
and stuff?  And it doesn't look at the other effects it might be having.
And the finding is that there is no generalizable systematic evidence that
it improving learning outcomes T few times it does is when the teacher has
incorporated the technology into the teaching. So it's not just a tool from
the outside, but very much embedded in existing teaching methods, and it
makes the teaching better which improves the outcome.  So it's really about
adoption by the teachers not just the students.  And people who benefit the
greatest when you look at the students are the ones who already come from
middle class, upper middle class families who have access at home and have
educated parents.  It doesn't bridge the gap but I do agree that we need to
look at a definition of success that is broader than just learning
outcomes.

>> So curriculum integration is one variable, but your last point is the
one thing you do know about student performance is the most important
variable is across culture s cultures.  It's nothing unique in that sense.
Did you want to comment at all or move on?

>> No, I think I agree. Probably I would add that, so, the one success
model seems to be Uruguay, and there's a few interesting things about that
model.  It's a small country. It's a manageable size.  And they decided to
connect all schools.  There's something to be said of the scale of the
project.  And the big advantage is they have a state-owned operator.  So
all the components are aligned in Uruguay.  Can you replicate the success
in other countries?  Highly doubtful. You don't have operators and the
scale doesn't work.  I think a lot of people look, and there is a big
question about being able to replicate it in other contexts.

>> Although we divided it by region for the convenience of presentation,
I'm hearing consistent themes and things that have been successful and not.
Nigel, did you want to jump?

>> Only to say that I'm no expert in this.  In terms of the UK, there's
been some interesting studies done on this as well.  And you know, I know
it's all relatively difficult. There's been this move in some schools to,
you know, every pupil has to have a laptop or bring it into the school and
that's the...  there's been this focus on having a device.  And as has been
said, what's been found is that, you know, if you take the same curriculum,
I mean, the pupils that have to have devices are the ones that use them at
school or whatever, there's no difference between the test scores that come
out and what seems to be happening to an extent is that the... there's too
much focus on the technology and not enough on the actual curriculum.  And
business leaders are saying to the, you know, education department, look,
these people that are coming out, they can use the devices.  But they don't
seem to be able to put it into the context of, you know, what the overall
picture is.

>> MODERATOR: I don't want to prolong this.  It's been a great but a long
afternoon.  Here you go.

>> This brings up to me the World Bank development part.  We seem to have
the analog piece of it and also we are not funding that analog piece.  The
people piece.  The people-centered piece, the teachers, the families, the
parental encouragement.  The culture that says we can hope to increase
economic opportunity for young people.  We can give young people something
to aim for. And we are not offering ways for young people to do projects
that they could get excited about. So I see a missing piece here, which is
the World Bank development report has said they are missing the analog
piece. The U.N. is going about the sustainable development goals. There is
a big gap that we all know about.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  That's what the overall projects are being tied
together to do. So a couple of the take-aways for me.  One theme that came
across globally: Taxes, high prices artificially. Two, artificial scarcity.
Three, tracking the backhaul middle mile problem.  Four, the capacity
building, right? Whether it's in the schools or whether it's individual s.
And again, we've had some examples of where we've had success and not.  It
is something that can move the needle.  Was there anything that in addition
from the panelists or anybody else that I missed in terms of trying to draw
out some common lessons learned from the region?

>> Sure.  I could probably add that one other thing that's emerging is ICT
policy is not... there's no such thing as gender blind ICT policy.  So one
of the things that we have to be very aware of is there has to be a focus
on gender responsiveness. So we're not coming back up in ten years and
saying we thought we connected everyone but it turns out we left these
people behind.  That's a specific thing that we have seen.

>> MODERATOR: Six, globally closing the gender gap.

>> It does not seem to be main reason, but language is.

>> MODERATOR: Relevancy on the content side in terms of local language?
Okay.  Modifying number five.  Great.  So I think we have...  did I miss
something?  Anybody?  I think we have a list of six really important
things, Karen?

>> Seven.  The role of government.  Not only in taxation but also in
control versus...

>> MODERATOR: So the government as an enabler versus a barrier looking to
specific policies that affect the other six does that help?  We have a
list.  So I want to thank the panelists for being great.  Karen, I don't
know how you want to proceed from here, but we are close to five.  It's
been a really long afternoon.  But I think it's been productive. One more
thing left: I'm going to give the mic to Karen. But thank the panelists
please. [ Applause ]

>> KAREN McCABE: As Pepper says, it's been a long day and it's day 0, so
and there's a lot going on.  I know you have asked us, May Lyn, we have
asked you to help with us the mapping and theme sessions that we've heard.
I know we're a little late as the day is dwindling down, but if you can put
us through some of the paces so that we can contribute to our report.
Thanks.

>> I think what I want to offer the people here is a chance to say what are
the short, medium, and long-term opportunities that you can see on a
personal basis, not representing your institutions but from what you have
heard about the themes?  I would like you to take a couple of minutes to
sit and think about the short, medium, and long term things that you would
take away.  And following that, actually share some of that with us.
Because nothing happens without somebody caring and doing something.  And
we've heard so much and it's been strummed into my head by Vince that if
somebody doesn't take action from this, nothing will happen.  And the
internet has always been about someone caring and doing it. So I want to
have you stop and think, remember that future generations are going to be
affected by some of what you can do and what we can do together. We began
this whole session by all different groups saying we need to work together.
We actually haven't come up together that we have said we will work
together on.  The people left in this room are the ones who spoke, mostly.
So what are we going to work together on?  Please take two minutes to think
by yourself of the things that you heard today.  What are you going to take
action on? Okay?  You have two minutes.

>> That was a close call.

>> KAREN McCABE: I think how we can join our communities and I think a lot
of the effort has to be local.  And it has to be contextcontextural.
Working within the local community's needs and what works in that region.
The sense of volunteerism to engage with other projects is a critical thing
that we're looking to do:

>> Thank you, Karen.  Pepper?

>> This just came up, right?  So it's, you know, committing to work with...
and part of it, governments.  What we also heard was it is from the
research side from actually having facts that help government officials who
want to actually do the right thing, but they may not know entirely how or
what and what are the levers to turn.  Now that's something that the people
in this room and the people who are here earlier actually can speak to.
We've talked about capacity building and skills. It's also about capacity
building for decision-makers so they can make better decisions. I think we
can as a community, help that process.  And so, you know, one is nodding
yes.  He knows how that can actually make a difference.

>> I think we have a problem with institutional structures in a lot of
countries.  It's a real problem with silos.  You don't have the content and
the telecom cannot deal with content.  I was inspired by what Paul Mitchell
said.  Kevin Wong who brought in technical mentors to work with teachers.
So I have a wish for Microsoft to continue to extend that.  And work with
all of the digital literacy programs to have local people involved.  So
that's my short-term wish.

>> This is my fifth or sixth IGF, and what I notice this year and many
people have been here if many years.  It encourages them to really elevate
our outreach.  Why not try to invite other ministers with other ministries.
These are key stake holders.  Not saying they're the only stakeholder, it's
important to have them in the room especially when we have such important
dialogue.  I feel like for us it may be valuable to think strategically
whether it's a letter or formal outreach in the next few weeks is a good
opportunity for us to cross pollinate, which I think was one of the
observations of the prior speaker.  So that's something that we can work on
together.

>> Thank you.  Anyone else? Okay.  I think we have a road map.  What we'll
be doing is working with this through the next four years with the IEEE
World Bank internet society meetings.  The next one will be in April.
We'll have a planning meeting and take this input and continue to move it
forward.  So thank you, Karen, for hosting this whole thing...  okay. Back
to Karen.

>> I will do a quick wrap-up. Just to mention, the background to this
session was really to harness that positive spirit that I think Nigel
mentioned in the beginning where a lot of organizations are really taking
action and commitments to expand access.  And that we all have these
different initiatives going but we see a value of collaboration.  So this
session was a seed for future collaborations.  So it has symbolic meaning
to it and a practical side where we wanted to kick start discussions here
at the IGF, and to gather some of the input from today and submit it to the
connecting next billion main session on Friday. So I've been taking notes
all day, and we'll write this up in a summary that will be shared on
Friday.  I think I'm the last speaker for today, so I would just like to
thank all the speakers and participants and the co-organizers of this
session.

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