INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM ADDRESSES ACCESS, DIVERSITY

 

RIO DE JANEIRO, 13 November 2007 -- “Access for the next five billion” and diversity were the themes at the second day of the Internet Governance Forum, which is meeting in Rio de Janeiro from 12 to 15 November.

Preparations for the Forum had shown that for many countries, especially developing countries, access was the single most important issue, said Internet Governance Forum Executive Coordinator Markus Kummer.  They saw access not in terms of technology and connectivity, but in terms of access for development.

The task was now to bring the next billion to the net, Mr. Kummer said.  Ten years ago the mark of 1 billion Internet users would have seemed unthinkable, and was now a reality.  Much progress had been made in the last year in expanding Internet broadband.  But the next billion would be a poorer billion, and the development aspects of the Internet would become more prominent.

Helio Costa, Brazil's Minister of Communications, said information and communication infrastructure was stimulated by Governments, while its development was the responsibility of private players.  An environment of broad and fair competition was essential to connect a larger number of people.  In this respect, the existence of efficient regulatory tools could help to stimulate lower access prices and better services.

The availability of infrastructure must come together with low-cost access solutions, Mr. Costa said.  All Governments were struggling to build sustainable models of Internet access for their citizens.  But the high costs of international connections was an obstacle, and solutions should be found for routing Internet traffic increasingly closer to the users, in order to reduce the prices that most of the developing world was forced to pay.

Next-generation networks and telephony operators would expand the offer of services to consumers, he said.  These technologies represented a huge challenge for developing countries, since often they did not have traffic exchange points, and this created an excessive burden to their Internet access.  Developing countries should have access to financial and technical resources allowing them to build their own Network Access Points.

Internet supply was growing, said Jacquelynn Ruff, Verizon's Vice-President for Public Policy in International Regulatory Affairs, as backbone operators around the world upgraded their networks.  In the last 12 months, global Internet bandwidth had risen by 68 per cent, and Latin America was one of the fastest-growing regions, with a rate of 73 per cent.  This was the result of investment in infrastructure and services, as capital that could be invested in Internet connectivity was truly global in nature.

The size of local market was a problem for small countries, said Maui Sanford, President of the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association.  But competition could help create regional markets, and many countries had created regional Internet Exchange Points (IEP), through which traffic could be handled without resorting to expensive IEP located in Europe or the United States.

Africa represented only a small portion of Internet users, said Mouhammed Diop, Chief Executive Officer of Senegal’s Next.sn, and African countries had unsuccessfully tried to go at it alone, while Europe some 10 years ago had realized the need for a regional approach.

The afternoon session addressed diversity in its many aspects -- linguistic, cultural and media-related.  Participants stressed the importance of open, non-proprietary standards, as well as the use of free and open-source software.

Daniel Pimienta, Director of Fundredes in the Dominican Republic, said only 500 languages were on the Web.  Like in the case of biodiversity, this limited cultural diversity was a threat to human well-being.

David Appasamy, Chief Communication Officer of India's Sify Ltd., said fishermen in India were consulting the Web at 4:30 in the morning to locate and quickly reach fish shoals.  Fishermen were no longer lost at sea because the weather forecast allowed them to avoid storms.  The “disruptive nature of the Internet” had social aspects as well, allowing young people to meet online and eventually ask their parents to “arrange” the marriage, also leading to relationships across castes, as one could not ask online the caste to which the interlocutor belonged.

Monthian Buntan, Executive Director of Thailand's Association for the Blind, said that for persons with disabilities, diversity meant accessibility, and their goal was to achieve full Internet accessibility.  “The Internet should be a caring, peaceful and barrier-free place,” he said.

Ben Petrazzini, of the International Development Research Centre, said diversity meant localization, and development would not happen without local capacity-building.  His organization was carrying out a $2 million project in Asia to develop digital content in 11 languages.  A similar project in Africa involved 24 languages.  The Portal Mapuche project in Latin America and the Caribbean was helping to create networks of content producers.  National educational networks utilized the Portal to disseminate educational material across countries speaking the same language.  Languages with limited numbers of speakers were at risk, and a legal agreement loosening copyright restrictions on material for local linguistic use should be devised.

Yesterday afternoon's session on critical Internet resources addressed issues such as the management of Domain Name Systems, Internet Protocols and root servers, as well as the transition to multilingualism.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and former chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said there had been substantial progress in the last 12 months in expanding the domain name space towards non-Latin scripts.  Testing was under way of a set with 11 scripts not using Latin characters, to evaluate their effect on applications such as browsers and e-mails.  The goal was to enable ICANN to invite proposals for Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in these new character sets around the middle of 2008, for both country code TLDs and for the generic ones.

The Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses would eventually be exhausted, Mr. Cerf said, and there would not be any more of that address space to hand out.  ICANN's blocks, which were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries, would probably be exhausted around the middle of 2010.  This showed the importance of introducing a concurrent, non-compatible operation, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), with a much larger address space.  Thus the importance of adopting policies that would encourage IPv6 connectivity among all Internet service providers.  Governments could subsidize the cost of interexchange points that would encourage interconnection using IPv6 address space, so as to reach as quickly as possible a fully connected IPv6 system, in parallel with the IPv4 system.

Capacity-building was one of the Millennium Development Goals, Mr. Cerf said.  “And, in my view, nothing could be more important than to build additional capacity so that we can reach the other five and a half billion people in the world who do not yet have access to the Internet.”  The biggest focus of attention should be establishing policies that would encourage the implementation and spread of access to the Internet, he said.

Some 1,700 participants are attending the Forum, 500 of them from Brazil.  The largest representation is from civil society, followed by Government and the private sector.

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