Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Naiorbi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 30, 2011 - 14:30 PM
***
The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
****
>> Welcome to our workshop entitled "The Impact of Mobile Internet on Internet Governance."
We are pleased to have a panel that will be explaining to us through their work and through their expertise and how can both mobile Internet and governance impact. I'd like to introduce John Walubengo.
If you could give us a few words introducing yourself and give us a few words on the topic.
>> JOHN WALUBENGO: Thank you. John Walubengo is my name. Lecturer at the College of Kenya, and -- can't hear me?
Okay. I also sit and serve on the AfriNIC board. When I was asked to talk about the impact of mobile Internet on Internet Governance I put together a few slides and I don't know if -- okay. There you go.
I put together some thoughts on what you can see there is my, if you may say, opening remarks. I gave the definition of Internet Governance the way I understood it to be, the rules, procedures, and practices for influencing the evolution of the Internet. Yeah, that slide.
So I was saying from the perspective of what Internet Governance is the rules, procedures and practices for influencing the evolution of Internet, meaning that discussing how different stakeholders can be in a position to influence how the Internet develops.
I then noted the Internet in general is open, transparent and accessible. However, in contrast, you find that mobile Internet, on the other hand, is relatively limited from that perspective of open, transparent, in the sense for you to use mobile Internet, you must first subscribe to an operator who then of course has his own rules of how you would be able to use that particular service and it so happens in Africa the majority of Internet access is through mobile services like in Kenya, where we have close to 25 million subscribers out of the population of 40 million. You will find that 95% of Internet is through mobile Internet.
Beyond that, you find that next to me you have Gitau that worked for SafariCOM and even then you find the majority of Internet users, close to 70%, use one mobile operator.
So for me, I felt that the opportunities that we have to discuss Internet Governance in general become limited when you look at Internet from the mobile access point.
My second slide which contains the final remarks is that I decided to flip the question and say: To what extent has Internet Governance impacted on mobile Internet?
Because I found Internet Governance as a discussion point in Kenya, and East Africa in general, has matured. We have discussed Internet Governance for the last four or so years at the global level. Of course this is the 6th one, but at a local level we have every year continued to discuss this issue and mobile Internet issues have found their way into our Internet Governance discourse. And some of the things we discuss include, for example, security for mobile money. Everybody by now must have heard of Empresa, a revolutionary service, but to what extent is it secure?
We have things to do with privacy of customer records. I know for one that in Kenya with we don't have as yet
(Echo)
Legislation like data protection up, the safety of customers' records really is left to the operator. There is no overriding national legislation to protect customers' information so that if the operators decide, for example, to sell your records for marketing purposes, there is very little choice you have there.
Then there's a theme of availability of service to what extent are customers assured of service availability. Back to Empresa, if it goes down for even 15 minutes there's a national outcry but from a governance perspective we need to move beyond outcry and have opportunities to engage in operators in order to negotiate the rules and procedures to which they probably can provide security, provide privacy and availability of services.
In conclusion, I go back to the original question: What is the impact of mobile Internet on the Internet Governance? And my conclusion is that I have not even thought this as yet but probably we are pleased to have Gitau from Safari come and one of the panelists is from the mobile sector and would want to probably hand over to him from there. Thank you.
>> Thank you, John, for that. And I think you already introduced that we will be discussing this topic so I'll hand the question over to you. If you would introduce yourself.
>> I work for a company called Renaissance Mobile. Fairly recently started company, actually in December of last year, what we introduce is the platforms for mobile phones so basically the sets and the software adaptation then needed, for instance, for Android and so on for -- we sell these platforms to mobile phone manufacturers who then create the phones out of that.
Our heritage comes from the Japanese semiconductor market which our mother company, Renaissance Electronics, bought the Nokia wireless modem which produced the chips and technology that are used with the phone actually connecting to the network and from there to the Internet.
Our technology is actually pretty widely used in the world in all Nokia phones.
Okay. Let's move on.
What I'll talk about here is a little bit more the technological side of mobile Internet but trying to emphasize a little bit where it touches upon intergovernance and regulation as well. But if we start with the actually trying to somehow link to that, what John said before, is that mobile Internet is the enabler, especially in developing countries but also in many other regions also in developed countries to reach point, especially those who are not -- who don't have the possibility or are not in the reach of the fixed access to the Internet.
This is basically because the mobile networks are very good and very cost effective to cover large regions and mobile phones also give the ability to use the Internet without having a direct dependence to the power grid for the end user differently than desktop or fixed Internet connections. What we think is really that we are seeing here are the wireless revolution for the Internet, similar that what we saw as the mobile phone revolution started with GSM some years ago where basically the -- we can reach everybody and give basically a lot of people can afford a phone rather than a PC, and can actually access the Internet very much in the same way as now people can afford mobile phone to access voice services, SMS services, differently than people were able to do when it fixed voice services were the only game in town.
Next slide, please.
However, when we look at the deploying of mobile systems or we have to think about certain things to actually get the advantages of the mobile technologies. First of all, which is very important, standardized technologies because that enables multiple vendors and avoids locking to a certain vendor or limited set of vendors. This means better competition, this means wider adaptation, bigger volumes and therefore more cost-effective technologies.
Also the possibility for people to move from one network to another through roaming.
Another important thing is to see we also use harmonized spectrum regulation. Using standardized gives the possibility of basically enabling to enjoy the global market and getting the cost effective equipment rather than using specialized equipment with possibly very limited set of vendors supporting that. The other thing is these are obvious things that well you have to use standardized technology, you shouldn't even some exotic radio frequencies which are not supported by mainstream vendors. But one thing is also to look at technologies that seem to have a big uptake in the market as well. Because if you get standardized technology which works in good spectrum but nobody else is using that technology it doesn't give you the benefits you want and basically the costs of the technology become again higher than needed in the market.
Of course, to make sure that -- arrange in the -- in any segment of the business. Next slide, please. What we are seeing is devices now, and of course I speak from my company's background, what we see is the devices, end user devices, are becoming more cost effective and more affordable and that is new technology is becoming quite accessible quite quickly; you have Smart Phone technology, so better processors or high-end enough processors to run Smart Phone platforms like Android becoming more cost-effective and the Smart Phone experience coming also to the lower and middle end Smart Phones very soon.
Of course with the technology -- technical advantages we are getting these platforms more cost effective by doing system on a chip, systems basically that useless energy than the old Smart Phones that you might have which you have to basically charge every day or even multiple times in the day.
What is also interesting is that we see that the different devices are kind of blurring together so you don't -- the old classification of a phone and PC and so on is a little bit going away. Smart Phones, tablets and PCs are getting quite similar and you don't sometimes cannot even tell those apart.
This is also good news in the user, mobile Internet, rather use mobile access to the Internet. It's still the same Internet. Access is just different.
It's basically these devices are becoming more cost effective themselves and of course things continue to get smaller and as they do, new applications that of mobile access can be made, likes like measuring to measuring or healthcare or safety which we're not able -- which weren't able to be used before because of prohibitive costs or size or power consumption. That was actually my last side so thank you very much and I will happened it back to the Chair.
>> CHAIR: Thank you for that global overview of the thing, of the issue. I would like now to have John Gitau bring to our attention the Kenyan experience in mobile Internet since apparently there is a lot to be told about the Kenyan experience.
>> JOHN GITAU: Thank you. Welcome to this forum. I'm John as has been mentioned several times. I work at SafariCOM doing the network design and also been involved in these industry scenes around 1999 or thereabouts.
Oh the way I'll structure this, we'll first rush through the history, you know, just to show where the Internet came from as far as Kenya is concerned and how regulation from the beginning was -- we really can't say we had a lot of regulation. Apart from on spectrum most of the ISPs that are doing this were always ahead of most of the governing bodies. Next slide, please.
You can skip that one for now.
All right. So basically mobile networks the handsets we have had a mobile network for quite a while now. Actually before 2000 in Kenya -- used to offer mobile connectivity, not necessarily Internet. And what happened several years before then, around 1994, 1995, we had a small NGO that was running and offering web services.
At around after about five years of Internet connectivity, not necessarily just from these guys, we had other players getting in and we had around 200,000 Internet users. Most were NGOs and international organizations.
Now, what happened maybe let's say in 2002, 2003, SafariCOM in partnership with another ISP that used to just offer ISP services, who I used to work for at the time, launched a service called 951.
What you could do with this service was you could dial in the same way people dial in with your regular land line, it was basically a dialup service, build as such, used to be very expensive. But immediately you could see a huge uptick of the service from specifically end users working work working in marginalized areas. We are talking about someone working in northeastern, next to Nigeria or maybe they have an office in Sudan and they needed to send something and had to drive all the way to Nairobi so the nearest town.
Whatever IT that was available at the time. So 951 saved them quite a lot of time and I can imagine money and it was very convenient for quite a number of people.
At around the same time we had quite a number of mobile network operators coming in, I think one of the biggest ones at the time was Mobile Planet. And they were giving or issuing news a lot to users on a subscription model. So again mobile was already having an impact in the sense that people had a lot of information, you didn't are to buy a full newspaper to get head lines since this would be sent over to you automatically by these guys. Well, apart from those people who are offering content at that time, the difference between then and now, it's not really that big as far as content is concerned.
What you'll find is we didn't have a lot of local content being generated. So far it's good, and I will credit that to the fact a lot of people are connected now.
This we... -- (Inaudible) -- a lot of people started getting connected on this service, I think almost 200,000 are, no, sorry, 20,000 people are using that particular service at that time for various things.
I need the next slide.
Okay, we'll just use mine, it's fine so yeah over time the networks evolved and we have GPRS coming up and we had a service of slightly fast ever service running on edge and later we had UMTS and this is what we are currently offering now in terms of mobile operation. Of course we could be talking of other 4G networks we're currently testing like MTE and we have (Speaking off-mic) but that's not really mobile.
So some of the key drivers for this penetration, for this high usage at that time, if you -- not sure how many of you looked at the first graph we showed there but what we currently have is a large number, huge number of users and as for the time that at that time was taken, around 15 million handsets can actually do data. Now, granted they don't all connect at the same time but what that means at one point or another in the lifetime of that handset it has connected and gotten an IP address on the network. That is a huge number if you start to think about things you can push to these users, content they can access and that kind of thing.
Yeah. Handsets have almost become quite cheap. If I was to walk backwards, we had 2009, two key things happened. First of all, the tax on handsets to Kenya was actually dropped so as you can imagine within a very short period we had quite a number of handsets coming into Kenya. What you will do is later you'll see the slides but what I have here is some of the services you are offering like Empresa, for instance, yeah, I think if you go back one slide -- yeah, yeah, there you go.
In 2009, what we had is taxes drastically dropping and all of us, quite a number of phones flooded the market. This was a good thing and for some people it was -- well, you can look at it both ways. There was a good and the bad but most was really good because all of a sudden people could access services like Empresa, I can't think of a single Kenyan who can't afford a phone just because -- most is because of maybe out of choice, maybe they don't know how to use one but virtually everyone here had been able to afford a phone now. Which means everybody can access quite a number of services. For instance, you have SMS is basic service that everybody practically has. Our Empresa runs on a similar card. As you can imagine everybody pretty much has access to it.
That is a mobile money transfer service, for those of you who might not know what that is. And the social impact of this, economic growth out of this alone has been quite huge. Then we have connectivity that also happens to come in the same year and content providers and most content still comes from abroad. As you can imagine it become better and with that came another driver for better happened sets. Today we have the Android, I think the name is (off-mic), great example of a extremely cheap handset a lot of people are going for now and they can really get good experience.
If you go to the next slide we included numbers and as you can see there, what we had is penetration for mobile Internet, basically mobile handsets which pretty much came with the Internet is about 50 to 70%.
Mobile operators as you can see contributed a lot more in part of gross to the economy and if you combine the cheaper handsets with the fiber connectivity then what you have is immediately you have a very powerful platform to reach a lot more people. Yeah. So we have those gains as part of what happened almost immediately.
So between 2009 to now, -- I think they presented this at this very workshop in another room and they say that handset sales went up by more than 200%.
As we'll see later, mobile phones are very instrumental in civic engagements during some -- during times of crisis in Kenya in 2007 and a lot of things were actually made Foss by the fact people could now engage with people they needed to talk to.
If I go back to Empresa and mobile payments what you have now is people reverse engineering platform and using it for -- if you go to most of our sites right now and if you -- actually happening even in South Africa and everywhere else, this particular product is being used. We have a lot of people using Empresa, we have people partnering with SafariCOM to offer Visa services like you can top off your Visa card and then transact online. You can buy direct -- people go to bars now and buy for stuff with Empresa nowadays. That's a huge driver.
If you go to the next slide I'll show you the numbers we are discussing here.
What is actually happening is that on most networks you can actually tell which hand sets are doing what at any given time. So you can tell which phones are using 3G, that means these guys are getting really good service, who is using edge, who is using GPRS and while sometimes it happens it could be the network depending on what you are doing, maybe handsets don't support 3G or faster edge, some phones we have a huge influx of phones that don't have some e-mail or details that can actually identify them and most of the times we'll just assume they don't have data. That should be data, sorry.
And from this as you can imagine and in other forums where we discussed stuff like IPBC and what might actually drive it. Someone tells you the penetration for data, you start seeing why basically some of the technologies that are coming in the near future, for instance, if you are someone developing content and you expect high-end, I don't know, maybe you need a specific type of screen, then if you work with most of these operators you can actually be told how many people for instance are using Androids.
I don't know how open that they would be to sharing this information but my point is there's a little visibility on what's happening and of course this brings up the issues on privacy and security. But what I'm trying to bring out here is a lot of information is available and a lot can be done with this and that tells you that a lot more time on GPRS which means they are low-he said dominoes what tends to happen is the guys on 3G will actually be pushing more data than -- anybody that has use the service -- you can video-conference on 3G, you can Skype, do WebEx, whatever it is you enjoy doing.
You also have other things. Some are on iPods which will still show up as a lot and it's a huge enabler for things you might want to do that are not necessarily available. For nonmobile devices. The other thing -- we have devices now like iPod chip sets which means we are not doing anything, they are just on the network. That means they are not doing 3G and I can imagine that is happening all the time.
Yeah? I can see WiFi playing a huge roll in driving this data further
Next slide. Now, one of the services we have seen a huge, huge uptick is Twitter. Now, the interesting thing with Twitter for us is anybody with a mobile phone, anybody, suddenly is on the Internet, you know? So most Twitter services, it means if you can send an SMS someone will see it online basically so when I'm thinking of what you can do with the Internet I'm not limiting myself to a phone or mobile device connected to the Internet. A phone things you can use. I am imagining a scenario where my the is dirty or something is not working out right but you are following the -- the mayor is following you and you can tell them, look, someone needs to clean this up and look at this. Our very own -- a lot of stuff now I think the network outages -- you probably will find them before nice thing to have for us.
And I'm hoping -- I don't know, there's a huge, a huge debate among me and a few colleagues on the fact that some of these services as they become more and more important, as you can imagine, if we lost the international capacity it means all these people using Twitter can't use the service so it becomes very interesting when you talk of governance and how we can ensure some of these services as much as we are using them and happy with the way they are being used now, over time as more is created that a lot more innovation happens locally and this content is posted and locally as much as possible in 2007 we had violence in Kenya after an election and this service, if you go to Shadi.com, what happens was these guys quickly came up from a platform that could crowd-source a lot of information like which area is planning, which roads can we avoid, where are the trouble spots, do you know anybody who is wounded or needs help, that kind of thing.
So this was a really good version that came out of this particular crisis.
Empresa, as mentioned earlier, is doing a lot for online payments which I can't even predict the growth. The data I have probably won't do justice to what will happen to online payments if you combine that with mobile payments, not just Empresa, each country has something going for mobile payments and it could be anything. If you think bit, if you have that on your phone, that's currency, yeah. We have a very popular service that allows you to transfer air time or credit for that matter
Then we had what is -- what Walubengo mentioned in terms of consumer rights on the Internet, not really very well known by the consumer actually utilizing the services and it is very interesting debatewise, every once in a while like what -- I mean, if everybody is on Facebook, for instance, or if one of -- an MP has a blog and it's very popular and something happens to whoever, like does the consumer actually have a right to this content? I don't know.
This is probably something we this discuss a bit further. The other thing you notice is this content is not localized. Facebook is not in any local language that I can think of. Most users out of those 13 million, I don't know, I can't imagine more than -- very few of them actually speak and write English so there is a need for some of this content to be pushed in a language or in a format that these users would understand.
I think that's pretty much it for now. During the Q and A we can probably discuss some of these things a bit further.
>> CHAIR: Thank you, John, for your elaborate discussion about the case here in Kenya. I'll probably go to our next speaker now before we go to Q and A.
Adiel, could you give us a more, first of all, I apologize for the technical difficulties you faced, John, during your presentations.
And Adiel, if you could give us a more general perspective of the region and especially the emerging and developing economies and how this issue would affect them. Thank you.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Thank you very much. I'm Adiel Akplogan, CEO of AfriNIC.
How the evolution of the environment will pact Internet Governance and us directly, I think in his introduction he said clearly the same.
We are leading some fundamental change in what has been the Internet, what is the Internet.
Mobile Internet is becoming the norm, the solution in many countries in Africa. Just because the legacy information we are not up to capacity to provide users the built to connect or ability to use the Internet as it is being used today.
So we are seeing this connectivity moving to the end user to the edge.
If we take into consideration some evolution as well on the critical Internet management, we are seeing IPVCs, talking a lot about them. IPVCs are coming up. We are talking a lot about the new GTLD. We can easily imagine how this thing can be pushed to end users so those that start playing a fundamental role in how all these resources are managed for instance. If we imagine that every mobile user will have their own I PVC preferences, how are we imagining them contributing to our policy development process, for instance. How are we going to reach out to them so that our policy really takes into consideration their concern.
Can we imagine every user of mobile phone having their own domain name because they have the ability to do that, GTLD process through or the evolution of the technology.
So my -- my intervention raises a question about what will be the end user's involvement of positioning into more Internet Governance model.
We are defending the stakeholder approach where today the technical community is the one involving the nitty-gritty of the development of the Internet mainly and we have a civil society in government as well joining and trying to work together.
Tomorrow maybe the more important actors in this area will be end users because they will be the ones impacting how the technology will be evolving.
Or are we going to see all this concentrated in the happened of network operators? Mobile operators instead of end users. Will they be the proxy of those end users and take more... be more involved in Internet Governance in general.
One thing that is sure is the environment is fundamentally changing even for Internet engineers. They have to now integrate mobile in their standards, design and topology, et cetera. So the main portion which goes to discuss more is how do we see from developing country perspective, knowing where we are going and the impact that mobile Internet is having on our use of the Internet. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you, Adiel, for that brief statement.
As I heard from all the different panelists, they touch on each and every one individually on very fundamental and core aspect of Internet Governance which would be openness and security and privacy or critical Internet resources or access and diversity which are all Internet Governance related issues and all brought together with one combined together with one topic which is mobile Internet.
On that note I'd like to open the floor for questions and comments on either or any of these specific topics I just mentioned and also the question that Adiel posed to the crowd. Thank you. Yes, please. If you would introduce yourself and affiliation, please.
>> Okay. I'm Kalvin. I work as a web developer. I'd like to talk about the mobile Internet content in the Kenyan case.
I tend to think we are not yet there. It's not every day you'll try to get a government website from your mobile phone and be able to access it because of the technology platform. Probably this was made on a PC and not a mobile platform and I tend to think we need to work on that, develop local content. We need to develop local content so that people can access nowadays the Internet is not all about communication. It's about information and access to information. If we really provide platform that everybody can access, content that everybody can access on whatever device he has then I tend to think that we will be there. Because one thing is just like it was said earlier on, in our local -- here in Kenya, many people can afford a mobile phone than a PC
It's easy to access Internet from your mobile phone and affordable than a PC. I'll take the case of SafariCOM. They started selling cheap affordable Smart Phones, and dried phones. It has pushed the number of people who are accessing Internet via mobile phone.
Those are my comments. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much. Any other comments?
Please.
>> Thank you, my name is Norbert and I'm speaking for Human Dignity Initiative, a small Christian ministry and human rights advocacy group.
I'm thinking -- I'm from Switzerland personally so in Switzerland we have computers which are a bit bigger than the normal mobile phone and when the portable devices take over the role that the bigger computers typically used to take, then I think there's an important aspect of openness, freedom, and at risk because on this computer I can install the operating system of my choice and I have the freedom to install one that allows me to Fink tinker. Do you see the same way to get the freedom mobile wise, like perhaps standardizing the interface between the mobile phone operator and the operating system so that you can actually communicate freely with a choice of operating systems?
>> CHAIR: Let me try to get one more question before the panelists answer. Is there anybody else? Okay. So we go to comments. Who would prefer to go first? Yes. Please.
>> The other gentleman seemed to have quieted so I will speak up.
About the -- I'm not of course an expert on local Kenyan content by any means or stretch of any imagination. I understand the problem, though, that was what we had in also -- (unintelligible) -- some years ago is basically lack of mobile content, lack of usage of the capabilities of the phones because you basically couldn't reach anything meaningful or it wouldn't look right or it would take too much time to download.
We have made since quite a bit of -- phones have become much more capable, bigger screens, bigger processors, faster communication mechanisms so I would think that even the Kenyan government websites in a couple years are readable from the mobile phone.
When the development of the technologies go further as quickly as they can, unless of course the Kenyan government decides to put a lot of new animation and using new technologies that are available maybe on PC more readily than at least in the lower segment of the phones.
But, however, that said, still we'll -- thinking of the local economy, when you build your websites, thinking of the mobile access, because you always will have a smaller screen just because of the size issue, the phone will have to fit in your pocket and if the screen is, I don't know, 22 inches wide you won't fit it in your pocket.
You can basically there will always be a difference in at least in size of the screen and making it taking into account it has to be readable from the smaller screen. That is very important. I think it was a very good point, what the gentleman there said.
Answering maybe also to the other question quite quickly. On mobile platforms, is there a possibility to bring the similar kind of model to mobile phones that are currently in PCs? Of course everything is possible. Some phones already now run Linux. Some you can upgrade software on that. For instance, the Nokia N 900 was a phone where you could install -- while it was running Linux you could install other operating systems on that. I have seen on the Web people have done that. How easy that is, that is another question.
But this comes a little bit to the thing that while it would be perhaps possible to standardize this, there is a risk of course when you start standardizing hardware platforms very strictly that you also start hampering the development of technology.
This goes also a little bit to the business models of phone manufacturers. What is their business model? What do they think you can do with your phone? Also the question of security. What do you open up when you basically can install another operating system. What kind of security issues do you encounter? Because mobile phones are often considered quite secure, people trust them, maybe a little bit more than PCs.
I know that this doesn't answer your question completely but hopefully gives you direction of what the situation currently is.
>> I will just touch on two of the points. For mobile content, this is a global issue but probably more accurate because of the use that we are seeing of mobile phone and I think the comment is quite right if we want to develop the Internet using the mobile, we need to translate more and more content to mobile device format so that they can be easily accessible but that is a process and I think we are going to reach there.
The second thing is about the usability of mobile phone and the fact that it is an extension of what we used to do with laptops. I think with mobile we are going even further because with your computer, you will are to first thing is that they -- the -- a computer will be able to reach, specifically in very countries is very limited.
Secondly, what we are talking about is mobile. Mobility. Ability for everyone to be able to access everything from everywhere at any time, even in your -- any possible, from any possible way.
So that change a little bit from what we have today where we are more tied to something which is the laptop or the desktop which are fixed and provide constraint in terms of mobility and moving. It will be very rare that you would take a laptop and tweet and chatting while you are working. You can do that on your mobile, you can be in the car.
It's democratized definitely the use of the Internet but it's also exposed and uses more than they are using with a laptop. In many families they only have one desktop in the house and everybody uses it. It doesn't give the privacy to one person but with the mobile you have 10 people in the house, they have different mobiles doing different things but from same location, for instance, what is the impact on that?
I was talking about policy development a few minutes ago. Will that mean end users will have to be more involved in policy discussion? For instance, there is a policy proposal from law enforcement to better document IPVC addresses because they think assignments will go even further down to individuals.
Want to see more information on that.
What is the take of end user to the very few he said users really take stocks in what is happening on policy development because we rely on operators to provide us the address we want and they are responsible. If they are blocking the operators. In case that we are foreseeing this will even drill down to the end users.
>> Just to take on both again in terms of mobile content at least from an operator's point of view, what you have, well, mobile like the gentleman say, the phones that don't -- that cannot get content directly from the Internet, can't read HTML or whatever reason, what most operators will do is adapt this content before they deliver it to you. That happens. But sometimes it happens that the phone is not able to signal for what the capabilities are and it happens that it's not adapted probably so yes I agree, that's a major hindrance to users enjoying content.
Now, the one on us having local contents I think it's been addressed in this room and in other rooms. It being even localized, it being adapted for people with disabilities, it's been discussed several times and hoping very soon we'll see policy papers actually addressing these issues.
This is everything including language. I want to see the government sites in all our indigenous languages because they all have access to these devices.
The other thing I would probably want to point out is when you talk of mobile Internet, it's mainly this more probably more to do with the device that is mobile that you're walking around with it, able to do more with it. Doesn't have to necessarily be a phone, doesn't even have to have that base band chip set. Doesn't are to -- all it need to do is be connected and this connectivity, this is one of the biggest issues, one of the things that is being discussed. How do you give connectivity to a mobile device and we have our technologies maybe three years from now somebody will come up with something new. We have seen so many changes, I wouldn't limit us to what we have now.
Home networking will change a lot. I think Adiel is covering that quite well. I can expect a lot of changes. Even we don't have demand for some of these services yet but I can imagine machine to machine communications, all these things will require, I don't know, will be quite interesting to see how that works out.
The other limitation as far as content development tends to be a lot of people complain about the fact you can't access the sim card which was critical applications. When I was talking to developer friends and something they are frustrated about is -- on a SIM card, you can't access it and start writing stuff. You can't change anything basically and yeah, I can understand their frustration but for now hopefully over time things will change.
The other thing to address, the other gentleman, when it comes to the openness of these devices, what is coming out right now really when you buy a device. People are breaking i pods for goodness' sake. Online 90% of applications is not from Apple, yeah. It's either something someone wrote a friend or I downloaded off the 'net so I think over time we are probably where we were with PCs a long, long time ago when all you had was Microsoft and all you had was Linux for the geeks or a few guys.
Over time we'll see a fundamental shift in the way the development and how people use their devices now. Security and privacy are totally different issues that need to be addressed. You can expect to see a lot of spam from SMS, if you configure your phone and someone uses it to spam, it could happen, you can see it happening.
I'm not sure that addresses much but we'll see a lot more openness as we carry on but doesn't mean we'll have to deal with a lot more challenges just the same way we've had to deal with the ones for PC, only this time they'll be many, many, many more users.
>> CHAIR: So what you are saying is that we look more into security and privacy and looking a bit more deeper. Intellectual property as well.
>> Yeah, exactly. Realize this time when providers were shielding users by maybe using not -- I think even SafariCOM until 2009 who actually -- all users before we made decision to give guys IPs. Because today we are told if you want IPs you will get. But immediately as you can imagine some guy, someone configures his phone, you can't practically in stall an S -- you have a public IP address, someone will use it. Nothing stops someone from using it.
-- (unintelligible) -- is another great example. If you install something on the phone, yes, you'll pay a heavy bill. How do you address these concerns for consumers because you might not even know why he's paying so much money but some of these things will have to be addressed so you're right.
>> Hi, I'm pat Walsh, director of privacy with the GSMA. I'm quite interested in some comments.
John Walubengo, first, I think you made the comment that privacy of customer records logs in the absence of law the private and security of data is left to operators' practices. That might have been true before the Smart Phone but the reality of the Smart Phone is that it's global. We've talked here about Facebook, in a session this morning many people use Facebook, other apps provided by global entities so the data flow is global, immediate access, put a patch work of laws that exist elsewhere but no laws here. What kind of framework would you propose because it's not now left to operators to decide the privacy practices. You have a number of global entities all of which do not have a consistent approach so how do you deliver the consistency that is required but also reflects local cultural and social requirements that people might have in Kenya or nij ger ya and then John get at that, to pick on your point you said you have a -- broken iPhone or iPad and you were downloading apps.
Where it's easy to get -- to comply with law, how do you think you'll get a small-time developer to comply with law who maybe doesn't even know that law exists. And the other thing is we need to focus on the economic opportunities that exist to developers in Africa and India where they develop apps that are downloaded by consumers around the world. But where they're developing those apps with no formal privacy framework so frame of reference to design those apps with privacy built in. I think there are tup tis here and I'm just curious what the panel thinks about how you would frame that here in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Yes. I think those are at the same time complex questions and very burning today because we are right in the middle of the change of society and -- specifically but I would say that those issues look global now because we don't have a contribution to the information society yet.
I will easily see that more and more developing country, for instance, using application like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera when they start understanding the impact of that data, uploading, retention, privacy issue will start thinking about how they can localize those within their own jurisdiction so to be able to have proper framework to cover their constituency on that.
That is one question the mobile use of the Internet is also proposing.
>> Can I respond slightly? I mean, in Europe they tried that. They have a -- two European directives, and they have an e-privacy directive which applies to telcos And ISPs. You have one directive in 27 states it's been implemented in 27 different ways. If you want to go the European way, trust me, it will be very difficult for you to design and build products and achieve the economies of scale and save money. I'm curious what you might be proposing for Kenya and for other African countries really.
>> Maybe I want won't come up with solution here now because we are all in a learning curve but at the same time I think we have to start somewhere and knowing that there are some approach and I'm sure the European, those directives may be reviewed in a few years to adjust to the reality that now they are already doing it but they have created a framework that addressed 0the issue, first taking into consideration maybe Africa will not have to take that same road because we have nothing yet. Today now different countries are trying at their pace to set up privacy, data protection app et cetera. -- (unintelligible) -- which has been released recently but it's new for us ourselves because we operate in the business way we hold a lot of data from our members.
We have to apply to the privacy.
Now, how do we internationalize that in Africa? Can we?
Only that is another big question. How localizing that will impact Internet Governance principles itself. That is why we call it sort analysis.
Maybe by democratizing the tool, but at the same time it comes with complete change in the way we see things. I have no answer. I mean, I cannot. Just like Adiel, I came here just pointing out the issues, I also didn't expect to provide a solution.
Just off the head, when you asked for solution I thought of the European Union declarations and then a few minutes later you say it's not working!
(Laughter)
But at the same time that for us is a starting point. At least you have some baselines in place and then from there you expect that different countries will be able to legislate using that as a guideline.
For me I still think that will be the initial way to go. But at the same time, there's this softer way of legislation through what they call regulations so you empower the local regulator to issue frequently or every so often regulations that impact sectors. That way it's easier to harmonize than if you put it down in an act or in the traditional way of formulating legislation. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: So I highly doubt we'll give any answer on this. In fact I probably will pose another one for instance how -- India probably -- actually has more developers than Kenya by far. I'm sure a lot of Kenyan developers look to India to learn. I'm not sure how much someone here knows of whether they have a policy framework, the reason I pick on India is, I don't know, I would assume or say they are still growing at a fast ever pace but.
>> We've been working with operators around the world on establishing a mobile privacy framework and we have draft privacy design guidelines, development, because we are concerned about protecting the built for developers to earn money. When we talk about review of the European framework, they're trying to understand now how to apply that entities overseas. Most people want apps that are free, they don't like paying for them. We all want something for free but it's not actually for free, is it? It's free because the developer has to pay his mortgage and feed his family. He monetizes a relationship by placing mobile media code into the app for example those are global, not local. There are big entities that want to stuff their ad into the app. Where the European regulator is thinking if that guy is in Kenya and -- he will be subject to European legislation.
We're trying to cut across that in the legislation in Asia, and come up with the baseline, John, you were talking about. I'm happy to talk to you about that and get you guys on board with it.
>> Opening another avenue in that, from what I hear, you are working with operators and app developer. Exactly. Will it not be more efficient, in fact, to take that even down to the education system itself where those apply indication builder are trying so they can understand the scope of what they are doing today in today's environment because as you say it's global, not now before you have your computer, develop your own application, not working. Now you put it online and it becomes global. So I think that mind set has to be added into development cost. If you look at more development cost, they are more teaching the developer to develop application for mobile than for PC because that's where the critical mass is. So why can't we add to that as well this notion of privacy, this notion of data protection.
>> CHAIR: Very important point because we know you can't expect a developer to understand the law, to be aware the law exists. Bad enough -- data protection.
So part of what we're doing is work out an education program to work with developers so later today I'm going across to -- to talk to them so we are reaching out and you're right that's a really crucial point, yes.
(Pause.)
>> I have a question concerning (Speaking off-mic) on mobile phone internet on the Empresa platform. I think many cases are reported whereby somebody has swindled off his money, told to follow certain instructions via SMS or via call. And then at the end of the day finds out he has transferred this money to somebody else. And now that most developers in Kenya are using Empresa more than Visa, Pay Pal due to the ease of developing and ease of payment, I tend to think that this is an issue that needs to be addressed, especially for consumers, and developers.
Thank you.
>> I think I'll assume that was --
(Laughter)
>> Go ahead.
>> Yeah. So okay. Fraud will happen and unfortunately the moment something becomes so popular, the moment people start using a system, things start happening. Actually it's a nice thing, most of the -- most of what you've talked about it's actually a user mistyping something, a user putting in the wrong details and a lot of awareness has gone into having -- if you check for the last three or so months we've been changing most SIM cards so users can actually be able to pick the -- instead of typing the number which is where the mistakes off, you can pick it off the SIM card. This is helping move things along and over time hopefully a lot more people who are using the service will have migrated to the SIM cards. Huge campaign by SafariCOM.
Now, going on to online payments. There's no -- there isn't really an API into Empresa. Remember, it sits on a SIM card. But the interesting thing is if you look at the messages from a phone it's easy to reverse engineer this and an application can deal with these and give you notification that well your payment went through or didn't go through, failed or passed and this is what guys like Pay Pal are working on. If you are a small-time developer it's easy for you to do it and tell people look send money to my phone and for a few hundred to maybe 1,000, several, if you are handling less than 500 transactions a day, that makes sense. I don't see why you would want to pay visa fees when you can use this.
But the process is the same when you have a problem unfortunately with Empresa you still have to call Safaricom and they have a mechanism for reversing this trend.
Going forward it will be interesting to see how this works out because I had a situation where let's say a lot, many developers start using this service online and then since it's not just SafariCOM. It's very -- you start using this service, suddenly making money and since there was no argument with let's say the operator using this in this manner. If they change something in the messaging that means you have to change the entire code base, for instance.
Maybe using it for e-commerce will have to be discussed further but yes, it works.
>> I think now from the service provider point of view Empresa being the largest money transfer we have in Kenya or in Africa, it's the best interest that you address this. As a developer it will make my work easier so it will have certain rules, certain policies, with regard to say if you are going to do -- going to like coming up with an API, something like that. Thank you.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: If you will just allow me to.
I think fraud will always happen. Fraud is part of human nature
(Laughter)
Yeah, we cannot fix that. But what we can do is at the policy level and I think that's why we have this workshop to see how our policy will change with mobile environment because if those things are happening today and people complain that's because there is no framework for them to get answers, to find a solution because there is no regulation or no policy framework. There may be for spam but not for this kind of thing which happened on mobile that's where the policy framework itself we have to rejuvenate itself to adapt to this new environment which is coming and which are involving more and more end users than operators in fact.
>> CHAIR: Topics like interconnecting Africa and usually the debate is between there is no reason to access because there's no content and no content because there's no access. I'm guessing in the mobile Internet case now we have access so it's even in the better stage than the fixed line networks here in Africa and we are in a very good place here to start developing platforms either with local content or international like Ushahidi that was mentioned that was developed here in Kenya and take that and develop it into a global level. While we are doing all this, we take into consideration the privacy issues and security and this is where I find Africa a very unique situation where it can actually lead in something like this and take the advantage of now that we need more mobile applications because we are most of you are on mobile devices and take the way forward with this.
So I'd like to hear final comments from all my panelists on this and, yes.
So we start from John, please.
>> JOHN WALUBENGO: For me it's been quite a fruitful discussion. When we started I felt the operators, particularly in the Kenyan situation where you have 10 million users and 10 million go through the mobile operator to access Internet so it looked like a very helpless situation.
But if you flip that, you realize that if there was a forum, a platform this many users could then come together and start discussions and demanding, then it provides an opportunity for these users to suddenly have the power to influence the way the operators serve them. Thank you.
>> I'll go with the same or we went with.
>> Yes, thank you, thank you, first of all for having me on the panel. This was a very interesting discussion, good and high level.
On the -- as you can see I'm not African or
(Laughter)
I come from very North Africa, say it that way. It is hard for me to give an African perspective but looking at what is happening in Africa, I was sitting on a access panel in the first IGF meeting in 2006. We were talking about how to get the unconnected connected.
It's much nicer to talk about problems you have when you are connected than the problems that of getting people connected and I think we are very well in the way of getting most of the people connected and it has been a much quicker pace run than what I thought.
Of course it brings problems or challenges we have to solving. One thing I heard from John Gitau, he said he had 15 million phones with stacks on them but they are not on all the time. A clear trend globally which comes with the Smart Phone is that the phones are on all the time. When we move to new technologies like LT you cannot even turn it off if you are connected to the network.
What I would like to have some kind of like a interim governance perspective say is that I hope you have a good plan of B6 very quickly. When those guys come online you will be burning a lot of IP addresses and this is a global trend, what is happening. Mobile operators have traditionally been the players that haven't been very well prepared for this, all of a sudden have a much bigger growth than the fixed providers had traditionally because they had 10, 15 years time of gathering customers and all of a sudden we have mobile operators gathering many more customers in much less time. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: John Gitau.
>> JOHN GITAU: Thank you. Yes. The IP, we are addressing the IP addresses issue. I believe we are probably one of the few operators in this region actually running IPV 6 and testing it on access and it's something that I've discussed before and we'll keep talking about for quite some time
But you're definitely right. A lot of things still need to happen to make sure IPV 6 is pushed to customers effectively. Actually other than these customers being always on, again the issue of content comes up because if most content, some content is on IPV 6 and is on IPV 4 as you can imagine there's a lot of tear-down and coming up, tear-down, and that's a huge load on a mobile network.
So there's a lot you are looking at in terms of IPV 6 and moving forward. Other than that to date it's been a fruitful discussion. Most comments specifically and governance issue and how we'll move forward and how some of these things will happen ensure that customers and all users and not just in Kenya, it's quite a number of people who are limited in this regard. They all benefit from these changes.
Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you.
Adiel.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Yes. Thank you.
Thank you, and I think we have tried to touch on different aspects of this. I would just conclude by saying that in fact the object different of this workshop is to try to open the discussion and in fact seeing an Internet Governance from a different perspective. We continue seeing it from the regular operators' perspective where we use fixed PC, mobile, laptop, et cetera, but the real problem will come tomorrow and tomorrow is in a few hours, from the mobile environment.
For us even in developing country we have to start seeing our issue differently. When we talk about exchange point, for instance, we talk about that and think first about, you know, regular data on nonregular note work but with the mobile we have content, critical mass and we are talking about accessing those content. How can we make those easy. Then it becomes very clear having a local exchange point completely changes and we don't have to look for the economical model. It is there because we have more than one mobile operator. They exchange traffic so they know they are sure about traffic. They are the ones who are facing the traffic issue now, not the ISP today.
Those are the people we have to bring into the game.
Talking about policy, same thing about policy. Environment is changing so rapidly. The critical mass is already there. So we don't have to wait and say maybe tomorrow we have to think about it. It's already happening. We have to react very quickly on putting in place the appropriate framework, regulatory or policy, that can really allow this mobile environment a chance for us in Africa to emerge and allow us to join the information society group. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you.
If you will all join me for a round of applause for our panelists, it's been a very fruitful panel and a lot of issues were touched on here and I think we are leaving everybody with a lot of things to think of and frameworks to be developed.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Session concluded)