Report on the IGF10
Joao Pessoa Brazil
10 - 13 November 2015
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Contents
Premise ................................................................................................................................................... 3
Participation and Participants ................................................................................................................. 3
Summary of significant topics ................................................................................................................. 3
Internet of things ................................................................................................................................ 3
Recommendations and Action Plan ................................................................................................ 3
National IGFs and their Operation ...................................................................................................... 4
Recommendations and Action Plan ................................................................................................ 4
Mobile Payment Systems.................................................................................................................... 5
Recommendations .......................................................................................................................... 5
Zero Rating / Net Neutrality Discussion.................................................................................................. 5
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 6
Openness and Free-flow of internet ....................................................................................................... 6
Creating a Conducive Environment for IXPs ........................................................................................... 7
Recommendations .......................................................................................................................... 7
Overall Recommendations...................................................................................................................... 7
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Premise
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a United Nations initiative whose mandate is to come up
with recommendations on the proper and safe use of the Internet for the benefit of all. This is the
global forum which, annually, brings together all practitioners on Internet Governance to come and
exchange ideas and set the tone for topical and important issues on the governance of the internet.
Participation and Participants
IGF10 saw approximately 2500 participants come in from virtually all countries in the world.
Representation was mainly from individuals who were representing organizations. The
organizations were of a true multi-stake holder nature. The dominance, non statistical though, was
certainly in favour of the developed world. This was more so with regards the leading of the
discussions, that is the panels tended to be clearly dominated by the developed world. Infact the
same faces tended to be discussants in a variety of forums.
Summary of significant topics
A varied array of topics were discussed at the forum. Below is a subset of the topics that were
discussed, these reflect the topics that we managed to participate in.
Internet of things
Internet of things is a situation where ordinary life objects are addressable and can be
communicated with and to through the Internet. This area has seen increased attention in the last
few years. The following issues were raised as part of this panel:
1. Work being done in IoT: There is lots of works happening including the ethics side of the issue.
Ethics is significant as there are issues of privacy and intrusion that have to be addressed.
2. Funding: The European Union has put assed 50Million for research on IoT.
3. Standardization Issues: IoT is a young but very dynamic field. There are a lot of institutions
involved in research on IoT. As a result this has created interoperability and standards issues.
This is something that needs to be looked at, without stifling innovation of course.
4. Gadgets and more: IoT is not about gadgets only. What is being created is a whole ecosystem.
Hence it also have aspects of ownership and accountability.
5. Security: Safety is key to IoT. Issues of data security, systems failure, network reliability, and
ordinary virus & spam attack have to be built into the system for it to be reliable and usable.
6. Network and Supporting Infrastructure: The network on which the IoT systems are sitting is
material. There is need for the network to be bother reliabl and seamless.
7. Ecosystem characteristics: There are a number of issues to consider with regards the
management of the IoT ecosystem. These include Identity management and persona
management.
Recommendations and Action Plan
1. Develop and be active in Internet of things projects:
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a. Farming related internet of things, concentrating on use of sensors in irrigation.
b. Determining of water levels in dams for drought or floods monitoring
c. Use of sensors on wildlife for movement monitoring
2. Zimbabwe Global Issues:
a. What is the implications on allocation of frequencies for research and development of
IoT.
b. Let us consider having a national forum of interested and active researchers?
c. Make this item one of the Youth-ZIGF initiative so that we can get millage from their
innovation
National IGFs and their Operation
There are a number of countries that have IGFs. There are also a number of regional IGFs that
include the Africa IGF and the Southern Africa IGF. It was noted that there is no direct relationship
between the IGF and the regional & national IGFs. Thus there is no direct interrelationships. As a
result an IGF SA (Support Agency) was formed.
The following issues were discussed:
1. Relationships between IGFs: There is no relationship between National --> Regional -->
Global IGF. Whereas Global IGF is a formation of the United Nations the National and
Regional IGFs are not directly linked to it officially.
2. Topics of interest at various IGFs:
o Zero rated internet
o Internet of things
o Access by 1 billion
o WISIS10 needs to be elaborated and linked to the IGF issues. This is because WISIS
has the focus on a new global digital agenda.
o Post-mortem meeting
o Young/Youth IGF:
 Have a deliberate strategy to have the youth involved in Internet use and
governance issues.
 Participation in development activities before the main IGF
 Entrepreneurship competitions and forums
3. Development and Support Issues:
o There are opportunities of fellowships at IG.
o IGF SA has grants for setting up IGFs and for participation in some of the events.
o IGF SA has a dedicated contact for National and Regional IGFs
Recommendations and Action Plan
1. Key takeaways at ZIGF: At our ZIGF we should have key-takeaways. These should be
sharable with regional and Africa IGFs. We should have meaningful presence (participation
and contribution) in regional and international fora.
2. Youth IGF: Consider having active participation by the Youth.
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Mobile Payment Systems
Mobile payment systems have changed the face of payments with regards who, when, and how
people are utilizing them. There have been lots of positives but also lots of negatives as this has
opened a security and abuse pandora's box.
The following issues were raised as being pertinent to the use of mobile payment systems.
1. Alibaba Payment System: AliPay is a payment system introduced by Alibaba. Being the
leading E-Commerce site, by turnover, this has great implications to the direction of mobile
payment systems. A number of key players like Apple have or are about to launch similar
payment systems.
2. MPesa: African Mobile Payment are dominated by the success of MPesa. MPesa has grown
from being a national to be a regional payment system.
3. Issue of concern for Mobile payments
a. There is need to have a seamless link between banks and mobile network
b. Standards are required across network and across banks
c. Literacy for technology use and increase of trust in the systems. this is moreso as
trust of the banking systems has been lost in quite a number of developing
countries.
d. Government has two key roles which are regulatory and advocacy for the use of
these platforms.
e. Interoperability and security of systems as the payment systems are becoming more
global in nature.
f. Increased friendliness of the system for example reversal of transactions still takes
much more time than committed transactions
Recommendations
1. Have advocacy of proper use of mobile payment systems.
Zero Rating / Net Neutrality Discussion
The issue of Net Neutality and Zero rating was a hot one, with different organisations raising
their own views on what they perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of Net
Neutrality and Zero rating of content. The majority of the discussions were centred on
Facebook’s freebasics program which it is giving access to a free version of Facebook on
mobile phones. This is made possible by agreements that will have been entered into by
Facebook and the mobile network operators. This means that operators will not charge
anyone for accessing freebasics, but at the same time charging or blocking other sites if the
user does not have credit in his phone.
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Net neutrality is more about competition
It means a lot to different people, Europe have decided on a regulation of Net Neutrality
ZERO rating is going to be the standard in some countries
ZERO rating is against the spirit of net Neutrality
Norway feels Zero rating is against net neutrality and it wants the practice to be stopped
Research findings on Zero rating SRILANKA, INDIA and BRAZIL.
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70% of people who do not use internet said they do not see the importance of internet
Zero rating can mislead the people because it offers a subset of the internet, thereby locking
users in one or two services,
Zero rating is also anti-competitive and forces customers to stick to a limited set of services
because the other services cost money
It was also pointed out that Zero rating service can foster internet demand, but it must not
be a permanent solution.
Zero rating service can also distort the internet demand, thereby affecting the internet
usage and access indicators, a lot of people now relate to Facebook as the internet.
Also focusing on Zero rating as the only way to improve access limits research into other
ways of improving access.
people asked why they are not using the internet is that they do not Need. Is Zero rating
drive content. The answer is cautiously yes. Zero rated Facebook had 49% vs 5% , same as
Wikipedia.
50% of users who use free basics, become paying customers within 1 month.
Conclusion
More research needs to be done to know the impact of Zero rating on Survival of
Telecommunications Operators in Africa,
2. The following Questions needs to be answered:
i) Do users of free basics then stay in the free basics,
ii) Will people find Zero rating attractive if they have other alternatives, People do not
know.
iii) What level of access is being achieved by Zero rating certain social media and Wikipedia
sites?
iv) Is Zero rating going to be permanent or just a tool to boost internet usage?
1.
Openness and Free-flow of internet
The Openness theme was also widely deliberated upon. This time around people seemed to
be in consensus of what needs to be done in order to make the internet free and open.
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The main problem why internet is not free flowing is because that there is a problem of
jurisdiction. Countries feel that they no longer able to control the internet, hence some
block it and others filter it.
The EU has have solved the issue of jurisdiction by uniting and becoming bigger, one big
jurisdiction, hence they derive the benefits of unity and are able to partially control the
internet in their jurisdiction, this can be seen by the laws being passed in the EU in relation
to internet content and privacy.
There is always a trade-off if people want a free flowing internet.
The Trade-offs are Privacy, Human rights and security but there are a lot of conflicts
between these rights, i.e right to privacy, is also conflicting with transparency, and also
conflicting with the right to security for others.
There is need to foster more horizontal relationships with the internet, A lot of states are
now using security as a reason to block the free flowing of information.
Free flow of information should be able to share information with any other device on the
internet, without regard to geography, etc. the second reason will be for economic
efficiency.
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7.
Just because something can talk to something it doesn’t mean that we have to force
everything to communicate with everything, there is need for people to be able to decide
who they want to talk to and who they don’t want to talk to.
Creating a Conducive Environment for IXPs
It was noted that Internet exchange points are a driver of internet access and foster the
development of local content and improve internet experience of the locals. However, it was
revealed that in the developing countries people are not connecting to IXPs, and that some of
the IXPs are failing to remain in operation due to various challenges related to funding.
The following recommendations were put forward:
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Governments can be resistant to IXPs because of their relationship to incumbent Telcos
Gvt can create incentives for IXPs, and also government can also limit uncertainties,
There is need for Gvt to assist with capacity building, transparency, and openness
Constraints on interconnection are constraints on access
When does it become economical to have an IXP
Need to look and remove any regulatory bearers that might exist
Setting up an IXP is 80% political and 20% technical
Need to make it interesting for the ISP to be connected to the IXP
Have major institutions to peer to the services at the IXP.
Recommendations
1. Zimbabwe should finalize and operationalize the installation of a new and real IXP.
Overall Recommendations
1. Continue having an active ZIGF that is visible locally, regionally, and globally. This will ensure
that our suggestions and positions are reflected at all levels.
2. Be involved in stimulating innovation, for instance the use of IoT in development.
3. Look at formulating or engaging young people within the context of IGF. This could be done
through competitions etc.,
4. Encourage the current effort of installing an IXP is Zimbabwe.
5. Ensure that our website is active and current at all given times. There is information
gathering that happens around the websites which has a direct bearing on our ability to
access IGF related resources.
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