Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Naiorbi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 27, 2011 - 11:00am
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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.
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>> EMILY TAYLOR: Good morning, I think we'll get started now. It is great to see so many of you in the room and welcome to the CENTR Workshop 98, "Emerging Issues in the ccTLD Ecosystem: Next Decades Challenges."
So this morning, as the title suggests, we're going to be really looking forward into the next ten years, trying to predict how the next decade's developments will impact particularly on the country code Top Level Domains in general and in developing countries in particular.
So we will be using the term ccTLD, country code Top Level Domain, a lot. I think many of you are familiar with the term. I see the Somalian manager sitting at the end so I don't think I need to explain that. But apologies in advance for any jargon.
So if a week is a long time in politics, then ten years is an eon in the Internet. If we think back how much the Internet has changed in the last 10 years, I think it gives us perhaps a hypothetical of what we might be expecting in the next 10 years.
So ten years ago I don't think there was any such thing as a social network. Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, mind you, we all were, weren't we!
(Laughter)
I believe there were 360 million Internet users at that time. All domain names were in Latin script, ASCII only. And the big thing, ten years ago, was how to cope with the conflict between trademarks and domain names.
Most country codes had restrictive registration rules which meant you had pass various tests before you allowed a domain name and part were staffed part-time through academic institutions and technical institutions.
So this last ten years has brought a change in practically every aspect of the Internet. CcTLDs have been affected no less. The past decade I'd say has been characterized by three things: Growth, growth, and growth. There are now two billion Internet users, two million domain names of which 85 million are ccTLDs.
Many ccTLDs have relaxed registration rules, offering registrations on a first come/first served basis. That's not to say any particular method is right or wrong, just an observation of what seems to have been the trend over the last 10 years. Internationalized domain names have been introduced, first in the domain itself at the second level and then in the past year to 18 months very excitingly at the top level in Russia, Qater, Egypt, China, to name a few.
Dispute resolution which was the hot topic a decade ago is now very well established. WIPO administers 66 ccTLD services and many others have actually developed their own processes.
So today we'll focus our discussions around four themes as we look ahead to the next decade for ccTLDs.
The first is new generic Top Level Domains, then we'll think about social networks and their impact on the country code domain system. Then look at disaster recovery, business continuity in the face of disasters and then ccTLDs in developing countries, what should we expect in the next decade.
Just a brief introduction on those and then I'll let our panelists talk.
We're poised on the brink of an unprecedented expansion of the domain name system. Starting early next year, you can apply for anything in any script, from any country, whether it's .Africa which we were talking about the last session or .gay or sport or love; it only costs $185,000 plus whatever you'll pay to your application consultants.
And the good news for developing countries is that there is a Working Group looking at how to help applicants for whom the fees and other barriers such as language will be prohibitive. The bad news is they have not agreed to any recommendations and the process is due to launch in January.
So the second theme we'll be looking at today is social networks.
According to Internet world stats there are now over 700 million Facebook users. Is that right, Richard? 800 million since last week. So according to my statistics -- Richard will correct me -- 70% of your users are based outside the U.S. and 50% of Facebook subscribers log on each day and interact with Facebook each day.
So just as an example, if we are comparing with the scale of ccTLDs in the UK where I come from, which is one of the largest and most successful ccTLDs with nearly 10 million registered domains, that's one domain for every 16 people in the UK.
Now, in contrast, Facebook which really hit just a couple years ago has 30 million, maybe more, British Facebook users so that's 1 in every two people in the UK is on Facebook.
There's a difference in scale there. Now, over the past few years we've experienced brutal destructive natural disasters: the earthquake in Haiti, Chile and most recently the tsunami in Japan. In each case the national domain name system has risen to the challenge and provided continuity of service when all other communication systems have failed. Then we will look at the next 10 years from a developing country perspective and particularly Africa. Ten years ago, the number of Internet users in Africa was 4.5 million and today it is nearly 120 million but that's still only 11% of the population of Africa.
As you all know, fixed costs -- fixed line costs remain high but the arrival of fiber optics undersea cables may change things, mobile costs are lower and it's no surprise mobile penetration in Africa is more than 40%.
As mobile has become Internet-enabled this will become the way that Africans get online.
So in today's workshop we'll look at the next big things in the Internet and how they will impact on ccTLDs, the national domain names.
In your pack you have an introduction to our distinguished panel today. We have Carolina Aguerre, manager of LACTLD, regional organization for Latin America. She'll speak to us today about the impact of new GTLDs on ccTLDs.
We also have on our panel Richard Allan, the director of public policy for Facebook, Richard was previously at Cisco and before that a member of Parliament.
Hiro Hotta is director of the Japanese country Top Level Domain and long-time member of the ccTLD community and a pioneer of internationalized domain names.
Dr. Paulos Nyrienda -- he's also a member of the academic staff at the physics department of the University of Malawi.
And finally last, but not least, Souleymane Oumtanaga is general manager of the Ivory Coast ccTLD.
So without further ado, I will let the panelists do their speaking. Carolina, are you ready to give your presentation or shall we do a bit more discussion first?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: I will be presenting studies. I think it would be better to have it online. There's a connection problem when we shifted the microphone around.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: While we wait for the connection problems to be resolved, Carolina, can I ask you a couple questions or do you want to -- yes, please. Would you prefer to switch order?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: We can start and I can talk about the numbers as you wish.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Let's get you connected and sorted and maybe I can start with Richard to talk about the impact of social networks and we'll come back to you if that's okay and then all be -- it's there. There we go. Emergency planning not necessary. Good. Welcome, and thank you very much for joining us today, Carolina. Over to you.
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: Thank you very much, Emily, thank you, CENTR for organizing this workshop. It's very important to have this space in the IGF and particularly I would like to present today following the topics that the organizer of the workshop planned initially to present to dwell on two of them underlined in blue, and but from a regional Latin America Caribbean perspective. So Latin America is a region that has been traditionally very fond of country code Top Level Domain names. If you look at those numbers we see the average ratio in the region is 4:1. That is that every four domain names is one gDLD on average and some countries such as the ones you see on the list, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, an Gila, Haiti and Guiana, this country code domain names account for more than 90% of the national registered domain names.
We have over six million names and these are estimates without Columbia, a very fast-growing ccTLD. We have the region also shown a stable growth of ccTLDs in the region accounting for 7% increase in the past year.
And the growth of gtLDs has been approximately 2% in the same -- I'm sorry, I did not put this in the slide but for the same dates, July of 2010 to July 2011.
So in a way, ccTLDs in the region are still in a comfort zone because of these numbers I presented just now. CcTLDs are very successful in attracting local, national clients to register their domain names with them. And new TLDs are till not really perceived as a real challenge and one of the challenges we have is to promote the debate among the community on what do these new TLDs bring to the region in terms of commercial policies and practices and that they need to be aware of how this will change their institutional and market ecosystem.
Some of the reasons why I think -- why we know ccTLDs are attractive in Latin America is that most of them have been working with the national brand and there's a country commercial community aligned with this national brand branding and national identity feeling and the other is that ccTLDs in the region have been proved to be really stable as a critical Internet resource. They have proved they are trustworthy, the citizens can count on them in times of crisis and there's been lots of different crises in the region, many have come from climate issues and atmospheric issues and others from political instability. This has been the case in Honduras in late 2009.
What are we expecting in terms of new TLDs in the region?
Okay. The big confirmed initiative will be the .let domain in -- it is organized by (Speaking off-mic), a regional organization that promotes e-commerce in Latin America.
It aims at becoming an identifier for the Latin community and this is -- the idea is that the Latin community feels identified with the feeling of Latinness when they are bored so Latin immigrants in the United States or in other regions of the world would feel attracted to the idea of having a generic Top Level Domain identified with a region.
The resources from this new venture would be used to enhance e-commerce in the region and to develop awareness among regional and e-commerce players in order to develop capacity building.
We are also expecting some large capital cities in Latin America to have their own gTLDs as well and I'm officially -- we are thinking that at least we'll have five regional gTLDs applying at the end of the year so those are the numbers we are sort of thinking about.
This was a little challenge that I have been sort of asking my colleagues and ccTLD members over the past weeks for the workshop to see how they envision the you new ecosystem with the social network sites and all this small commerce that takes place in Latin America using social networking sites and do they see this as a challenge and they were sort of, oh, I would like to have an idea, you tell me. So it's another issue that we really have to work on and device some strategies for them to become aware of what this might mean.
But Facebook penetration, and I'm just going to focus on Facebook as the largest social networking online platform, it has a very high penetration in cities. I mean, Chile has the highest penetration rate in the region with more than 50% now, and the average ranges from 15 to 38. There is still a lot of potential for growth for social networking sites.
And this is a parentheses, Latin America has some other interesting social networking platforms such as -- (unintelligible) -- which has been brought by Google a couple years ago and brought by Google and Sonico, an Argentine venture which attracts teenagers in most countries and they are really very important local regional social networking platforms so we are still not counting those big other players as well.
If you look at the top 10 gainers from May to June Facebook in the region we see Argentina, Colombia and Mexico had growth rates that ranged from 6% to at the point%, while the world averaged 1.7 so it's a very fast-growing region.
But what kind of ccTLD manager says to its community -- what are the benefits of having a domain name, in this case a country code Top Level Domain? Well if you have your own domain and you have privacy, your information, you have a greater control of the information and you will have the holder ship of your intellectual property, no?
So this is still issues that ccTLDs are sort of talking about informally but they have not addressed their own national communities about this.
And thinking about, this is like relating ideas but thinking about the new prospects of new gTLDs in the region that will come from large capital cities, Latin America is a continent where there are many cities that have over 10 million inhabitants and there is a strong identity issue with an urban district, and we can see these large cities are also heavy Facebook users where Internet penetration in Latin American cities is as high as in developed countries.
So can these become a competition for territory-bounded communities? Would a user in Mexico swap from a national data mix domain name to the Mexico DF? GTLD? Urban identification predominant over the national domain names? That's a point for discussion and thank you very much for being here.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Carolina, thank you very much for that very informative presentation.
It would be good to sort of see whether there are any questions from the audience at this stage, reactions to this. Were you surprised to hear of so many gTLD applications? Is there anything we want to reflect on here? I was particularly interested Carolina in what this will mean for the ccTLDs that have been quite ininsulateed at the national level. They'll have to formulate their brand value on why it makes sense and they'll have to learn new skills and maybe we might see failures in this new world. Just like to see whether there are any reactions from the audience at this stage or from the remote participation.
(Pause.)
Okay. Could you just introduce yourself before you begin.
>> I'm (Speaking off-mic) I work for Global Voices in Line and I have a question: Do you have so called stop lists for ccTLDs the list of domains that you cannot register?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: You mean things that are forbidden in the region?
>> Exactly.
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: There's not a regional venture capturing that, but I would say that some countries are already sort of working on it.
>> Do you have information, is it like tens of words forbidden or like thousands?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: I can't answer that question. I don't have the information. I'm sorry.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Any other questions or comments at this stage?
In that case I would like to move to Richard Allan of Facebook. He obviously will be picking up some of the themes that Carolina has introduced about the strength of social networks.
Richard, welcome to the session and thank you very much for participating.
>> RICHARD ALLAN: Thank you very much.
Emily, I will lead on from Carolina's presentation which I found very interesting and say that for me this is an opportunity to learn from the people in this room actually about the way in which you feel that the domain name system is going.
It's not something that I spend every day thinking about and having the opportunity here to do that will be helpful. What I want to do in my few minutes is describe building on her comments what the impact of social networks is generally and then digging down within that, what I think some of the key elements are when you are thinking about the CCTLD system. So in terms of the statistics, we did just release in new once last week and the numbers are we have 800 million monthly active users on the Facebook service, that's people who have logged on to Facebook at some time in the last 30 days. 75% of them are outside the U.S. There are two popular myths and one is it's about Americans and the other is about kids. Both are untrue, over 75% of users are outside the U.S. and over 80% of our users are 18 plus so teenagers are very much the minority on the network.
We are now translated into over 70 languages which is one of the reasons why the global user base has grown so significantly and the language translation part was done professionally, a lot by the community so 300,000 Facebook users contribute to the translation of our service and that is as you -- that crowd sourcing of translation has I much wider application built for Internet services as they seek to globalize. We are slightly more female than male in most countries which is great. Considering that the Internet was seen as the domain for male geeks. Historically we actually think the fact we have Internet sources that are so easy to use has meant we have spread to -- that's not a male/female thing, let's be very cholesterol, lot of services if you want to build Web sites you have to know programming and that was a geek thing, now pretty much anybody can get up and running on the core Internet service like ours.
It's accessible to a larger range. As we mature in countries like Chile, the fastest growing demographic tends to be 35+ and our growth is driven by weddings and babies, people in their late 20s or 30s who have babies or get married and say, mum, dad, if you want to see photos, sign up to Facebook so we have weddings and babies growth driver. That brings older people on to the 'net. The other key element is or efforts around mobile. We now have 350 million plus mobile users and what we have done is as well as designed a service for Smart Phones we have designed our service for dumb phones. So feature phones and we actually have a feature phone service and we have worked with mobile providers to make sure accessing our service is affordable. Bundling in a certain amount of free access is very important to spreading that.
What people do on the network is post a lot of stuff. I'll go into more why that impacts the domain name. Stuff is stuff that is all over the Internet typically. To give you the headline statistic it is two billion posts and comments a day, two billion. Last week we had our first half billion day where we had 500 million on the site in one day posting those comments and posts.
Just to turn immediately to the Facebook only use of ccTLDs we pull everything through Facebook. com. Quite interesting as I look around at the major Internet services. If you are building a global or single global network the idea of having lots of country domains is not attractive because you're selling yourself or putting yourself forward as a global network rather than lots of separate national networks. Historically a number would go even big ones go for local domains and often did that for regulatory reasons. They wanted to create a particular framework for a particular country and therefore for regulatory reasons it suited them to have a local country domain name. For us in terms of building a global network that does not suit us and in fact those regulation restrictions may actually be a negative for us so our position has been to work everything from Facebook rather than drive people through local networks.
For us it's very interesting to know the thinking of governments in respect to do you increase the variance between requirements to regulate country domains or try to get a level playing field. Say for global network too much is just a pain. You just don't need that. You want to have a single set of global standards. In terms of what this does for people, I think there are a number of different things. Firstly, for the individual we offer a service called time line, a place where people can express themselves in terms of what they shared online.
In the Web 2.0 area you are what you share. So you define yourself by the stuff you have shared online. We -- that's at the heart of what we are doing, offering people a place to do that. The thing has an impact on as an individual do you want to go and build your own website or express yourself.
Through a range of similar services where you aggregate the feeds and your online activity into one place and you are what you share. We think that will grow in interest. I don't know how you are when you are looking for somebody now for a new job but I will Google them. People used to say I'm worried what people find. Now you had been worried if people find nothing about you. They wonder what you have been doing for the last ten years. Actually your own self-express online, ability to demonstrate to people with control, with appropriate privacy controls there are things you have been doing and saying and aggregate those together is increasingly important part. They will do it through our network and similar networks rather than establishing your traditional blogger websites.
The other thing I think is critical in terms of how we change things is we have this social element to everything you do on the Web if you want to. Historically when you interacted with a website it was you and the site in that conversation. There are still many instances where you still want it to be you and the website if you are doing online banking it's generally good not to share that with friends but a one-to-one conversation with you and the bank. There would be a lot of places on the web where you want one to one but other places, if I came and commented on the IGF website, where there's added value in sharing that with my friends and community because I want to engage in a conversation, so lot of the stuff people are posting is a place where they want to engage in conversation.
That leads to a phenomenon we call social discovery where those are now taking place, information you get from the social network shows you the conversations that all of your peer group are involved in and you discover new content socially through them.
So instead of you going to a search engine and typing in I want to find the IGF, people already interested will do that, you simply sit there reading a feed of things other people you know are talking about. One of them talks about the IGF and links to it and you click the link, that's the way you discover getting IGF. Clearly that has an effect of masking domain names. They are not necessarily being surfaced to the individual. Simply getting a link maybe a photo and some information through that feed and clicking through but there is content on the domain name. That's a strong message that the model we built is great.
But it's not our expectation that content migrates into Facebook. Content stays on domains and we provided incredibly powerful tools for you to maintain it in your own space but then link into these social features and use us as a distribution platform. Newspapers and now stuff last week for music sites like Spotify and video sites can link into Facebook to get distribution but content is all sitting there on their domain and there are really important issues around trustworthiness of domains which become more significant when domains are hidden, not less.
So we have security systems in place that try to detect rogue links, I'm involved in debates around .info, extent to which our systems pick those links up because they there are well known issues around scamming sites using that particular TLD. Really big issues how the domain name providers protect our users and don't overly restrict the information they want to place through the site. Trustworthiness will be a big one. That's all. I'll close with saying content is king. Content is largely going to be hosted on domains that people can control themselves in tierly but what social networks are doing is providing a very new and very powerful form of social distribution of that content. So that people can integrate into that and little or no cost find ways to get that content to normal people.
We hope that will contribute to the overall growth and health of the Internet. Much broader range of people now discover stuff and follow it and use the Internet than ever happened before.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you very much. Have I got it right that you are saying that on the one hand the strength of Facebook is it's really an aggregator for all content, not seeking to replace the domain name system because without that there can't be other sites, however my question to you is: Is it really worth individuals any more registering their own domain names and bothering to set up the site when they can just have such an easy experience and also as you said such a community of existing users who know of Facebook and this might well be an aspect where the ccTLD registrations dodo suffer because of social networks? Do you think this is a fad or social networks are here to stay and they will have a lasting impact?
>> RICHARD ALLAN: I'd be in a lot of trouble if I said they were a fad!
(Laughter)
I think that the social mechanisms of adding social layer on to the Web is here to stay. It adds so much more value. Our users numbers are not evidence of the value, they are evidence of the attractive necessary of the proposition and it is something where the time has come. I would -- associate it with other broadly called Web 2.0 services that it's so much easier to be able to focus on the content that you want and then pull in a social graph, pull in a mapping service, pull in a music service, social service than build all these things yourself which is what you have to do five or ten years ago. That's here to stay.
I don't think we are actually aggregating all content. We're allowing people to post links to that content. Quite important distinction that is mostly about linking to content that is authorized and owned by somebody.
That's what we offer.
In terms of personal profiles thing I would say yes but what I would ask is: How many people really did build their own stuff? How many people really did get a personal domain name and how many people got a personal domain name, built something and didn't reregister because six months later they weren't maintaining it. I really don't think for -- not for 800 million people, that was not an accessible technology to do that and build your own blog. Even with the real easy blogging stuff. So we may impinge upon that but I think we add a lot of value in other ways.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: I see a lot of nods around the room when I see people trying personal sites and giving up.
Does anybody want to raise questions at this stage for Richard?
Please introduce yourself.
>> I'm Gideon -- from Africa. My question is many businesses and many organizations like to block the social sites but it is from the blogs that I read every day, right now you would find that someone would write say how Facebook or Twitter will help the employees to work better. Initially it was they are taking a lot of time from their scheduled time for people to do their job and many people are doing the social thing but right now I realize that it's opening up jobs even for people to do their social part of their -- the organization. My question is how are you helping businesses to sort of top the notion that the social media is not something that is official and rather make it part of the business? How are you helping the businesses to own their image on the social media?
Because Facebook and other -- have taken to be just about the person outside business rather than the person inside business. How are you helping the organizations?
Thank you.
>> RICHARD ALLAN: I work for a -- you haven't updated your status for two hours, what's wrong with you? That's slightly unusual. I think it's a very important question, for people to understand to flip that switch I think mentally from seeing social networks as distract hon to seeing them having business value and the primary argument we use is look the conversations is happening anyway, conversation is happening about your business, if you exclude yourself and sit there in the office, typically 9:00 to 5:00 sit there going la, la, la, and then at 5:00 you go home and join the conversation it's a kind of bizarre thing to do.
In order to to that and help people understand we totally understand if you are running a business you worry about employee productivity. In order to help that conversation we are building a business development team whose job is to go out and work with people to help understand those messages about how to gain value for the business.
That network is not as well-developed in Africa yet as it should be but my hope and expectation, one of the reasons I'm here is to be able to make connections so we can see how we can use the networks that exist in Africa to get messages out around how social networks can be. We'll get you to the point where you are hauled off for not doing your status rather than doing updates!
(Laughter)
>> EMILY TAYLOR: More questions? Let's also think about the new dTLDs as well. Carolina?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: Shared comment. I think perceptions of Latin America -- on the whole it's not competing but a synergy. Because actually from the Facebook side of a small firm then you go to the domain name so that's what they see.
>> I meant to say as well while our network is global most content is local and I think we'll hear about that disaster situation some but it is about lots of local communities connecting with local business examines people. I completely think the local domain name has a really important role in that.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Richard.
Yes, sir?
>> I'm Robert. I am a blogger. I just wanted to know how Facebook will handle the issue of copyright and infringements on their branch bran brands when somebody owns a social network locally, maybe not related to Facebook but a social network with Facebook.co.ke. Again, on translations, can you have a number for Africa, how many came from Africa? On the new time line introduced by Facebook last week, going back to the way Myspace is looking, what you replaced on myspace is what you are going back to. The way old myspace was looking.
>> RICHARD ALLAN: In terms of trademark and copyright infringement we do enforce so that's a simple one. I mean very important to understand culturally Facebook respects copyright respects trademarks, IP of others and expects the same back. We do enforce if people in fringe and there's been well known cases about that enforce meant that have hit the media.
In terms of African users translations I don't have a number but maybe we could connect and I'll ask the translations team if they have one. In terms of time line, if you have not seen it yet it's beautiful and not at all like Myspace. It's I'll show it to you again at the break if you don't mind and then I hope you'll look at it and go that's not like myspace, that's beautiful. I don't know why anyone won't want to.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Disaster recovery and business continuity. This is Hiro Hotta from the Japanese ccTLD to explain the impact of the earthquake and tsunami this year and the nuclear accident. Hiro, thank you very much.
>> HIRO HOTTA: Thank you, Emily and the participants. I'm going to talk about our experience of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant accident.
So this is from the viewpoint of running domain name infrastructure as part of critical Internet information, not from user side but from the operator's side. I'll talk about what happened in Japan, how the Internet was used and what JP registry, JPRS experienced and what JPRS does for the future.
So what happened in Japan? I don't talk much about this. Maybe you know a lot. So this is Japan. And the star point is the earthquake center. It's in the ocean. And here is Tokyo, Osaka and the nuclear plant is here. Now, what happened? March 11th in the afternoon the earthquake happened at 130 kilometers east/southeast of the peninsula and it's around 500 kilo meters northeast of Tokyo. Intensity was 7 based on the Japanese scale so the most intense one.
5 plus in the central area of Tokyo T building collapsed by quakes, building -- tsunami. It happened 30 to 90 minutes after the earthquake. The height was nine meters undersea and ran Upland slopes to 30 to 40 meters high and more than 20 -- 27 dead or missing. And nuclear plants disaster. It's still ongoing. Nuclear plants on the coast of the prefecture were intensely hit by earthquake and tsunami. Emergency situation occurred, broken by earthquake, broken by tsunami, explosion of power plant buildings, function of cooling system and radiation leak. People on the planet. Maybe 80,000 were still evacuated.
(Speaking off-mic) in combination with other power plants due to the earthquake. So the flashlights, candles, batteries sold out just after disaster. So how the Internet was used. This is a grap by our ministry. So as you see in the red point, Internet was used heavily to communicate just after the disaster. The media regarding this disaster, TVs and sites on the Internet and so on, so as I said, Internet was again used a lot to get information about the disaster so Internet was used as a communication tool and the information getting to the disaster. So Internet was important then.
So what we did or what we experienced from the disaster, so on the day of the earthquake, properties, facilities, objects, you know, office are broken, fell down. But it was not easy to spot all of our employees and affirm their safety.
Because even in business hours some were outside and some staff took days off due to annual days or sickness. And the initial communication was difficult because live phones, mobile phones were heavily congested and people could hardly grab communication lines or waves. Even tav safety check service we sign up this kind of service for emergency. But it didn't work unfortunately because of communication congestion. That's what they said.
Just after the big quake, all sorts of program finding must have been done immediately. Even in uneasy mental state. So for example safety of the employees and their families. To check the safety of the office circumstances, and continuity of the -- as a service provider such as TNS registry system, office system, and servers in data centers and network function so fortunately employees and their immediate families was safe and JP services were not disrupted and some office procedures -- it was small. But some employees couldn't go back home even at night. Because public transportation stopped the operation until safety checkups after intense earthquake. Cars were completely stalled on the road because many people tried to get home by cars and the roads were full of pedestrians walking home.
As a result 30 to 40 staff stayed overnight with blankets and sleeping bags in office. Then the newspaper said in Tokyo area over 137 people couldn't travel home on that day.
During several days after the earthquake, not all the public transportation services were back to normal. Some railway lines were severely damaged and -- reduced operation for the purpose of electric power save. And electric power down among designated areas so we were not at this area of power down so we were happy. But employees living in the areas were directed to work from home. So for them PCs have battery, but home routers in their home didn't work. Because of the power down. And employees were released from the office early enough to reach home safely before sunset, even they came to the office to work. The Ministry directed people to stay home as far as possible. In order for them to avoid travels and save electric power.
Domain names should be saved from an occasional removal. Usually the domain names have expiration date and after the date domains will be deleted. But in this situation, people in affected area may not be able to renew de main names because of nonfunctioning PCs because of not having time to do so or even because of not thinking about such tiny matters. So domain names registered in the disaster affected area were automatically renewed with no charge. This was our decision. We had dilemma. -- knocked down from the registry, from us, because no judge by the registry is for (Speaking off-mic) not for residents due to business structure because we are the wholesaler and the -- were the retailers. So customers buy from the retailers. So some -- some could not express relief to their residents because they were also suffered from the disaster.
We think about the revenue decrease that should be estimated, so shrinkage due to disaster and revenue decrease due to the -- described about.
So with this kind of experience what we do or what we did for the future as Internet infrastructure provider, so Internet infrastructure provider where money back if service stops doesn't work. We have to at least provide 100% service as an infrastructure. So what -- we should cope with the earthquakes and difficulty in commuting in case staff must stay in the office for a while. Because they cannot go home. They have to be in the office in case staff must stay at home for a while. And power outage, it's a planned power outage or sudden power outage and power save because we lack of -- we have lack of power because of the plant disaster.
So the points were the -- is fundamental to communication, the country as a ccTLD domain name and your usually accustomed staff is very important, very few people are familiar, especially in the country.
Not many people are (Speaking off-mic) so for initial needed movement after disaster setting up various kinds of communication channels among staff and with office buildings managers so we set up channels, phones, e-mails, Twitter, websites, even (Speaking off-mic) because the phone lines may not work, this kind of situation. Improvement of training, creation, training, formation, roll call, damage inspection, physical and of course the registry serves great inspection.
And purchasing and maintaining emergency for staff, food, water, glove, helmet, light. So I have my helmet on my side in my office. And sleeping bags, radios for office stairs, and for initial essential decision for organization, registry organization, we set up basic criteria for making stuff to go home, to come to office, and even how to handle visitors to the office in such a case. Should we make them go out of the office? Maybe not. What functions to survive because we are the infrastructure provider.
For emergency organizational structure of course we set up this and for registry (Speaking off-mic) so of course we have to define some levels and decide who will be informed about the status about how. It's special because we have to tell customer and maybe governments about the status because of infrastructure. This is the last slide. For business operation was 15%, we have to do this because we are -- lack of power in the summer. For unplanned power failure, because of the power -- maybe unplanned power failure may have happened and for geographical diverse sites, yes, this is very important points to provide a service to the whole world.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Hiro Hotta, thank you very much for that presentation, and the thing that struck me listening to it is that the thoroughness of your preparation. Your readiness for this terrible disaster is not something that can be built up instantly, and as we are all thinking together about the next decade ahead, it is quite an object lesson in the fact that maintaining continuity of service in the face of absolute devastation around you is something that needs careful planning, heavy investment and testing over years.
Congratulations for maintaining that service. And obviously all of us feel very much for what the Japanese people have gone through and so I'm going to -- unless there are any questions immediately sparked from Hiro's presentation, I'm going to move now to Dr. Paulos Nyirenda with our forward-looking focus for the next decade, looking at what is going to be affecting developing crisp ccTLDs.
We have heard about new gTLDs, impact of social network. We've heard about the important role of ccTLDs in providing continuity of service, particularly for their local population.
Paulos, thank you very much for participating today. I hope you can talk from a developing country aspect about the building up of the registry and as you look forward in the next 10 years what do you hope for and also what challenges are you expecting?
>> PAULOS NYIRENDA: Thank you very much. Paulos Nyirenda from Malawi. Good to be back here in Kenya and thanks, CENTR, for organizing this.
I'm one of those who hasn't been on Facebook for the last two years so maybe I need to have a little encouragement.
I'm going to talk about regulation or regulating trends in Africa and how they effect ccTLDs and look at specifically for southern Africa where Malawi is. I'm going to do this using some things we're doing and AFTOD where we actually carry out studies of ccTLD activities within the region.
One way of finding these studies is that regulation is playing a major driving factor in the development of ccTLDs in the region. So I will look at this and look at some cases and I think that as we proceed towards the next decade, we'll see that organizations like AFTOD can be or are a significant player in each region and hopefully this will be the case for the Africa region as well.
I'm not really photogenic so...
(Laughter)
Okay. So who are we? We, if we look at these as a point of African ccTLDs it deals with lots of issues within the region. It has a membership and Malawi is an active member.
Looking at legislation, I was going to look at it from the government's point of view. Right from the beginning in the process it was recognized that governments have legitimate interest in the ccTLDs and what we are seeing in the region is that governments are expressing this bypassing legislation and regulations that are having an impact on the ccTLDs.
In the region there is a very active process called building legal and -- frameworks that are having direct impact on ccTLDs. In a way, this is a little bit different from what is happening in the average -- regions. So looking at the regulation. Consists of the legal framework, laws that are passed by Parliament, regulate rules that are developed by the regulators, policy framework within each country, it's a sort of rules and laws that are designed to control the center, governor cern the center and govern the conduct.
Regulators are overseeing these processes in the various countries.
So we see that in most cases the regulators are sort of overall regulators. They manage ICT, they manage broadcasting, they manage domain names, there is impact growth on IP address, so what we are seeing are not separate regulators in the region, we are seeing the regulate -- form creating regulators that sort of manage everything.
In some countries specific ones are showing up and framework is developing a little bit faster.
For ccTLDs what we see is the regulated (Speaking off-mic) appears on two prominent levels. There is the global and there is the national level. Having been in the ccTLD area for some time, there is always a push for the national level and to make the global level of the framework to be as narrow as possible especially have you have been in the (Speaking off-mic) the contract code support organization and the icon, you find that ccTLDs try to push for the global policy framework to be as narrow as possible and for the national framework to be more prominent.
If I can just have a look at the global framework, this is really for the icon and the country code name support organization within ICANN and there are quite a few activities under this for regulation. Most of these have been done under the Working Group, Delegation Working Group, which has now evolved into the framework of -- Working Group.
Basically looking at the policy and its interpretation as the new gTLDs take off, what we see is this process will continue to grow and remain an active area of growth in the legal and regulated framework for ccTLDs. On the national level the normal perspective is that the national framework should be more emphasized compared to the global level.
And if we have the national policy and within the region, one of the very fast-developing areas is that nations are developing their national IC policies. This is relatively new in the accepts that before this, some of the countries actually did not have ICT policies. Malawi still does not have a national ICT policy.
So this is an evolving area and the development of the policy as part of the regulatory framework does have impact on the ccTLDs and we're seeing this in Malawi as the nation develops its national policy as well as the country reviews its national legal framework for the sector.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Paulos, can I ask a question. The regulation, is that typically -- what sort of process is going on? Multistakeholder process? Is it government-led? Does it vary from country to country and is it possible to generalize in any way to say, to tell us what impact the regulation that you are talking about is having on growth? Is it coping or is it inhibiting in your view?
>> PAULOS NYIRENDA: I was going to come to some examples. Yes, very brief. So with this I have some examples from southern Africa where this has been happening over the last few years and I have already mentioned South Africa. They used the example of Kenya, Tanzania was rededicated recently and as recent as a month ago -- (unintelligible) -- went through this change. New cases that are undergoing change, Zambia was mentioned in our recent case and we have new cases for Botswana, Malawi and probably Namibia, always an issue.
What we are seeing is the new framework are putting in place a mechanism that is assisting the ccTLD to grow and it is putting in place a system where the communities becomes more aware of the ccTLD so more registrations are taking place, in other words, there is more interest in the ccTLD.
One of the things that the region looked at was what is the best practice for the region? There was a workshop in Mauritius in 2009 where basically the region agreed that stakeholder model is probably best for the region. We are seeing these new cases cited are basically going into that and I'll close very shortly.
One of the emerging issues I think will need to be addressed is ownership. What is the property rights of ccTLDs or managers for their ccTLDs and the issue was discussed at the southern Africa IGF we need to be aware ownership will be a factor in the next ten years on the new issues within the region, one of the hardest topics at the moment is of course South Africa. It is expected to be the first gTLD and (Speaking off-mic) domains organization has taken this as a project of fTLD. When looking at the evolution have the regulatory framework we can quickly ask: Is the AU, for example, the regulator for this framework? How is it going to evolve? How would it handle (Speaking off-mic).
Finally, what I was going to talk about is the link to the regulation of other sectors. What we see in the region is that the regulation of finance, for example, has a major impact on the growth of the ccTLD.
And in the recently, there are many problems with payment systems so that when you are growing your ccTLD you need your domain paid for if the payment system is manual which is the case in many of these countries they need limits the number of registrations that you can do per day. Another issue that we want to look at is mobile Internet. How will this affect the growth of domains. As we already know probably Africa is facing probably the fastest mobile growth in the -- on the global scene. This is due to the fact the infrastructure is not there for other types within the region. I don't know how this will have impact on domains but one thing that is showing up is that the growth is acting as a push for other activities on the connectivity front and hopefully this will lead to domains as well.
In conclusion, there is a window of -- reform in the Africa region and this is affecting CCTLDs. Thank you.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Paulos, and the wind of regulatory reform is not just being felt in the developing regions but also in developed countries as well and that the trend of Internet is for Internet regulation rather than self-regulatory to the norms of a few years ago.
We just have a few minutes left and we want to go on to a final speaker, Souleymane Oumtanaaga, so we will hold any questions and comments and try to pick them up at the end.
So Souleymane, thank you for joining us and he will focus on the impact of development and capacity building and in particular the experience of the College International.
Thank you.
>> SOULEYMANE OUMTANAGA: Thank you very much. I'm from the Ivory Coast. (Speaking off-mic) -- partner of fTLD and also manager. I am here to present (Speaking off-mic) and I am going to present what the college international is going for African -- what is the hardship between this center and fTLD.
As I said, the college was created ethnic in 1998, for core development, project is about 6,000 to support action and project. Today we have members of College International, among which we have 14 organizations involved in ccTLD management as maybe universities, ministries, regulation, relevant stakeholders. Strong African presence, but members also come from Latin America and Europe.
(Speaking off-mic) to promote links along numbers. Number must be invoked in the project. Each year there is a meeting which the objective is to exchange best practice to integrate, exchange for coming year, discussion on related issues relevant to members of local authorities in ICT and Internet Governance.
(Speaking off-mic) training session standard (Speaking off-mic) the last session was in cam mere roon. (Speaking off-mic) international partnership, an open program of management. Distributed under the license and can be used, modified and distributed.
It is developed by an international team with representative from (Speaking off-mic) registry and under auspice of (Speaking off-mic) more important because of policies the program must first (Speaking off-mic) allows adaptation at different level. What are the lessons learned? Setting up a CLD is -- technical issues and organization and human resources, very strong (Speaking off-mic) organization in Africa, specific issues to tackle established local Internet community facing challenge for foreign corporation. There are also ways that I can mostly relate (Speaking off-mic) development is one of categories of workshop. College International has organized two workshops, worldwide development, Internet Governance -- strategy for Africa. Very positive feedback but how can it be translated into a -- building. There is partnership between ethnic and (Speaking off-mic) so to reach as a group to assist each other in action like reporting of resources.
(Speaking off-mic) enter into partnership agreement it is therefore. Agreement aimed to establish framework for collaboration wish to develop. Commitment of both parties to formalize the conservation and technical assistance in the field of Internet in Africa.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Sorry to interrupt you. Is the framework of cooperation available online? Because it might be easier for people to follow if we post a link to it and highlight a couple of the top features of it rather than to go through the legal agreement.
>> SOULEYMANE OUMTANAGA: I finish, then. Various activity and responding (Speaking off-mic) number of -- involved is 11, number of organized chain, is 23, number of trainees is 400. Number of fellowship is over 80. It is what I want to tell you this morning.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you very much indeed to you and to all the panelists, fascinating presentations, and I think everybody is struggling to keep these very rich subjects and to condense a lot of information into a short time so I thank you for that.
In the last few minutes are there questions or comments from the floor? In particular we heard about .Africa and that brought us back to where we started.
Yes, sir, please.
>> MALE SPEAKER: I am (off-mic) from Somalia. I want to mention what do I see as an African and citizen? What do I see as challenges ahead over the next ten years and beyond?
Let me summarize this. I think the challenges I see are things that you don't think of as challenges, power rs infrastructure, languages, configuration, this kind of thing you might not think about, you might say what's the problem with power, there is a problem with power. Really they delay or hamper our progress when we talk about the way forward. Very quickly about -- this might be (Speaking off-mic) here I want to mention things (Speaking off-mic) why can't I use the same? These are things we have to aggressively look at and see if be can solve and really open up if we want to compete with the world.
In the case of Somalia, you might say why am I mentioning it because some of you might think it's challenging in other things. (Speaking off-mic) we don't care where you are in Tokyo, you are welcome to open -- why we overregulate things, make things more complicated than it is.
Now, to summarize, I guess maybe we can think about looking at ccTLDs like any other trade thing. They might be even curious why is it we can close and say we cannot trade on this. We would like to trade in coffee. I'm sorry, I'm jumping all over the place. I will stop there.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you very much. Any other questions? Any thoughts about the .Africa application? Is that something that people support?
Gideon?
>> Just a question about the AU concerning the handling of -- do we think AU has the capacity to be perhaps a player or I organization that can help Africa achieve or like have issues like already we have politically it is not been really standing much to tell Africa where to go. Do you think AU can stand in and rain in on these issues? Thank you.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: I have time for a last question over here. Thank you, sir.
>> Comment more than a question. (Speaking off-mic) the question the previous speaker asked I think it's addressed to the wrong forum because I don't think anybody here is from the AU but it is important to point out obviously that the name Africa being a name of continent the AU obviously has things, legitimacy over the name so I think personally to try to question it is -- it's a question that is open. I don't think it will hinder or promote strongly the .Africa project. It will still run. Probably from the fTLD side we are hit with the AU doing that. We are also hit with the competition for the .Africa. Some people were saying -- funny and frankly stupid things sometimes about AFTLDs which I really think is childish more than anything. If people talk or complain about overregulation, then why do they have a problem with competition?
As for that, let us have 10 (Speaking off-mic) for .Africa. We'll go through the AUC and hope we'll get their endorsement and we believe we'll get that, but we will welcome competition and participation of the AU. As for over jeing laition the point my friend Mohammed made I don't think Africa is overregulated when it comes to (Speaking off-mic). We have a problem of lack of regulation in some substantial number of after African -- it's not defined. You do not know where the ccTLD for. The way it falls. Definitely say we still see a need for clear regulatory framework in African states. Thanks.
>> EMILY TAYLOR: Forward-looking note, I think that's an appropriate place to bring our discussion to an end today.
Thank you, all, very much for your active participation and it's great to see so many people in the room.
Obviously the next ten years will continue to bring change to our environment. I feel excited about what it will bring to developing countries, developing regions and let's see, it's interesting when we discuss regulation that some people think there's too much, some people think there's too little but we have really gone round a number of issues from uGTLDs to social networks, disaster recovery to the situation of developing countries.
Thank you all for participating and a big thank you to our panelists for their presentations and participation. Thank you.
(Applause)
(Session concluded)
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