The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. 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 event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Good morning, everybody. I'm the room coordinator. I want to give you some advises for the good development of this session.
We have this mic to the people in the second row, so if you have a question, please wait until the micro gets to you. And please stand up, because we are now streaming and it's important that you talk on the mic, and so it's right on the streaming.
Besides that, it's, in two minutes we start. Are we ready? Okay. Two minutes now. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Can you hear me? Yes. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this workshop on Internet fragmentation and net neutrality, and Zero‑Rating. First of all, thank you to the telecommunications institute for putting this together. We have an excellent group of panelists, very well‑balanced views.
So I hope you are able also to engage and follow with the panel. Let me just tell you how we are going to do this today. First of all, we are going to have a brief introduction from our colleagues from the Telecommunications Institute in Mexico, they are going to explain a little bit what was the spirit of this proposal, of them proposing this workshop.
Then I'm going to introduce each one of the panelists and I'm going to ask each one of them one question, one of the questions that was included in the background paper, which was uploaded into the workshop in IGF Web site.
So I will give them five minutes. It will take us the first 30, 35 minutes. After that, I might be making one additional questions to some of the panelists and then we will open the floor for some interaction.
Without further delay, I'm going to ask Victor Martinez to introduce the audience the idea of this workshop. Victor.
>> VICTOR MARTINEZ: Thank you very much, Rodrigo. Thank you all. Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to the institute to have this, the first time that the Telecommunications Institute organize a workshop inside the IGF. As you know, Mexico, this institution is a new body, in charge of the telecommunications and also competition matters for those sectors, and also we have the mandate to collaborate with all Mexican bodies, to guarantee the access to Telecoms and broadcasting services, including broadband and Internet. It is also for us very important to be here, and to collaborate with the multistakeholder community, in order to capture and collect all the ideas, these important issues of fragmentation of Internet and net neutrality. And this is over a general view is to discuss some matters in general for Internet fragmentation, and then try to introduce in some commercial practices that we need to capture and to see when we are talking about net neutrality.
But thank you again. Thank you all for the panelists for their moderator to set this invitation, and that is all. Thank you very much.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you, Victor. Thank you for organizing. Let me introduce you to the panelists, and of course no particular order. We have Cristina Monti, head of sector for Internet Governance and stakeholders engagement in the next generation Internet unit of the director general for communications network, content and technologies, DG connect, the European Commission. She contributes to the European Commission activities in the area of Internet governance, in relation to the Internet Governance Forum, IGF and Global Internet Policy Observatory. She is the accredited alternate representative of the European Commission to the Government advisory committee of ICANN. Welcome.
We have Mario, Commissioner, work experience of more than 20 years both in the public and private sector, national and international level in technological foresight, public policy and regulation of telecommunications and broadcasting. He obtained diploma in engineering, communication, electronics by the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico and degree of master in sciences in engineering by the University of Keio of Japan. He served as a optical communication researcher at the research and technology development laboratories of the Japanese company, and associate researcher at the laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a member of the Institute of Communications, Computer and Electronics in Japan and mechanical engineering of Mexico. The 10 of September of 2013 he was ratified by the senate of Mexico as Commissioner to the Federal Institute of Telecommunications for a period that will conclude as of February of year 2021. Commissioner Fromo has extensive experience in the international Arena. He has been head of the delegation for Mexico in many ICT related events, including the WCIT in 2012. Welcome. We have Commissioner Clyburn, Commissioner of United States Federal Communications Commission. She is serving a second term as a Democrat on the commission. She began her service at the SEC in August 2009, a long time champion of consumers and defenders of the public interest, she considers every commission proceeding with a eye toward how it will affect citizens. She has fought to promote the strong competition across all communication platforms, believing that the more robust and competitive the marketplace, the less need there is for regulation. However, when the market is not adequately addressing consumer concerns, Ms. Clyburn is a outspoken champion for smart targeted regulatory action. A pleasure to have you here.
We have remote, I hope he is listening to us, William Drake, international fellow, lecturer in the institute of mass communication and media research at the University of Zurich. He is currently a member of the nominating committee in ICANN, in which he has also served as a GNSO counselor and Civil Society constituency chair over the last decade. He was involved in the initial development of the IGF as a member of the working group on Internet Governance as well as IG summer schools and global Internet Governance academic network. Welcome remotely, Bill. Is he connected? Yes? Can he acknowledge that? Yes.
Later today, I don't know if Chinmayi Arun has already arrived, but she will be here shortly. She is Executive Director of the center of communications governance of national law at a university in Delhi, which is the only academic research center in India working on issues of information, law and policy. She is also an assistant Professor of Law at national law university Delhi, faculty associate of the Bergman client center at Harvard University and member of the Board of Directors of the digital Asia hub. We will be welcoming her shortly. Alejandro Pisanty excused, he is no longer joining us. But we have the pleasure and privilege to have with us Roslyn Layton, PhD fellow at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. Thank you very much for being here. Probably when I ask you the first question, you can help us with some more information about your background, please.
We are ready to roll. We are going to start with Bill Drake. We know he is connected. We are going to ask him one of the questions. Bill Drake, the concept of Internet fragmentation varies according to the Government, industrial, Civil Society or academia. Bill, from your point of view, what can be understood by Internet fragmentation? You have five minutes.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Am I being heard?
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Yes, Bill, we can hear you.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Fine, perfect. Good morning, everybody. Sorry not to be there. This is the first IGF meeting I have missed since before the beginning of the IGF. I've been asked to say a few words about the nature of fragmentation. I think a reference point for me in this is a paper that I did with Vint Cerf where we attempted to try to do a landscape overview of the problem fragmentation, recognizing that as was indicated in the introduction, people tend to talk about this term and deploy the term in very different ways, so the way business people talk about fragmentation, often they cite anything that raises their costs of doing business on a global scale, technical people tend to emphasize engineering problems, etcetera. Human rights people tend to emphasize the spread of censorship and so on.
Everybody has different kinds of views, which means to me that you need to take a wholistic step backwards and look at the big picture and recognize that there is a lot of different types of phenomena that can be related to the question of fragmentation. Not unlike what we went through over a decade ago with the debate over what does it mean to talk about Internet Governance. My baseline in talking about this is to start from the original architectural vision of the Internet, that engineers like Vint had in setting it up, was that many separately controlled autonomous systems or networks of which there are now 50,000, can come together by shared protocols to constitute a global network of packet switch networks, such that every device is able to exchange data packets with any other device that is willing to receive them. That is a key point, the willingness of both end points to communicate. With consistent functioning and interoperability on a end‑to‑end basis, so that you should be able to have applications that work the same for end point users, irrespective of their location, what technology they are using, who their service provider is and so on. Deviations from that idealized notion of an open Internet due to blocking or weakening of the connectivity between end points, between willing end points is I think the core concept and concern when talking about fragmentation.
I guess when I think about this problem, I tend to differentiate in terms of the different layers of the Internet Protocol stack, engineers tend to talk about problems occurring at the lower levels, the second and third levels of the network and transport. Some people think of it more in terms of stuff happening at the application level, how applications function. A lot of academics, scholars talk about the Internet, think of it as there is a fifth nominal layer, you could say, of content and transactions, the markets, digital spaces and so on that users constitute using those lower levels. To me, a lot of the fragmentation that is most interesting is at that level, at that fifth level of the space of flows that ties together people and processes from around the world.
When I think about fragmentation in this way, I would say you have got three different kinds of sources, technical fragmentation where you have developments in the underlying infrastructure, that impede the ability of systems to fully interoperate and exchange data packets and to function consistently, at all end points. That is usually at the lower levels. Governmental fragmentation which are policies and action that is constrain or prevent certain uses of the Internet to create distributor access information resources, these are generally targeted at the fifth layer that I talked about, imaginary layer of flows, processes, etcetera, although they can impact the lower levels as well. And commercial fragmentation, which again involves policies and actions that constrain or prevent certain uses and make it impossible for end points to be able to exchange resources and packets in order to create distributed and access to information.
That is what I'm concerned with, is essentially blockages that occur. A lot of the technical fragmentation is not necessarily a function of the intention of particular actors of fragment, often it's accumulation of different types of practices that have unintended consequences. But when we talk about commercial and governmental, very often what we are talking about there is an intentional act by a third party to essentially intercede between end points and establish a break between their ability to communicate. Last point I would make about all of this, because I think my five minutes is up, is that it's important to recognize that fragmentation is highly variable. So when we talk about it, we have to talk about different types of fragmentation in terms of not just a simple binary yes, no, there is fragmentation, no, there is not fragmentation, but in terms of the depth of the impact, for example. Some fragmentation may be deep structural and configure large parts of activity for a lot of actors. Other types of fragmentation may be more value and malleable and affect only a smaller range of actors or processes.
We have to look at how deep the impact is, whether it's intentional or unintentional, the character of it. You can even have positive fragmentation in a way, there may be cases where one would think that it's a good thing to establish these kinds of blockages, so that we can debate that point.
I will stop by simply saying my core concern in raising the notion of fragmentation is to say that it is a multi‑dimensional phenomena that varies in depth, intensity and so on, and in particular case that you are talking about, it's net neutrality and deviations from it, it's a form of commercial fragmentation where you have business practices that essentially make it difficult for willing parties to reach each other, while suppliers of content and users, and this is potentially problematic.
I will stop there. I'm here for any questions later on. Thank you.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Bill. This was an excellent presentation to try to narrow down the concepts we will be discussing here today. Thanks for offering these definitions.
I'll come back to you with some follow‑up questions after this first round. Then I'm going to go now with Cristina Monti and I'm going to ask her, what roles do the different stakeholders have to avoid fragmentation of the Internet?
>> CRISTINA MONTI: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's a very broad and complex question. Connecting to what Bill was just saying, it is quite clear that responses to Internet Governance must be joined to effort involving all stakeholders, considering the complexity of the Internet as a layer arrangement and the complexity of the phenomena that we have to deal when we talk about Internet fragmentation.
It is clear at the same time that the Internet is a global infrastructure, where different stakeholders need to work together. At the same time, from my perspective, the Internet works well without strong structural oversight by an international or intergovernmental bodies.
But maybe more balance should be sought within the existing structures, in order to both increase the legitimacy of current governance arrangements, and to solve and avoid issues like Internet fragmentation. We heard there are different types of Internet fragmentations.
I would say that depending on the areas and issues that we have to deal with, also different stakeholders can be sort of in the lead. So depending, so if we are talking about technical fragmentation, technical issues, then of course the technical community should be in the lead.
Then there are other areas where maybe Government and Civil Society could have a stronger role.
In a way, we should be careful when we consider, I'm talking also from my perspective from the European Commission, so when we talk about governments' role, there are different visions in different areas of the world. We have to make sure that the governments have to take care of ensuring that the rule of law is enforced and that they protect the public interest, but they have to be included in this more complex ecosystem. And this is not an easy thing to do.
In this context, maybe I would like to bring here an example, a concrete example where I think from my perspective again, the role of the public sector was important to avoid form of Internet fragmentation which is net neutrality. Here I would like to bring forward the example of the European Union legislation on net neutrality, which was adopted and entered into force in 30th of April 2016, so this year.
Now in the European Union, we have a regulation, a regulation means that we have a law which is directly applicable in all European Union member states, and it is a law on the open Internet. I think this is a major achievement, also in terms of what we would like to do in removing obstacles and creating a Digital Single Market in Europe.
I think it is important to stress that it's, it introduces a principle of nondiscriminatory traffic management, and gives a right which is enforceable, an individual right to end users who can access and distribute Internet content. It is the result of a long process, process of consultation with different players who of course had a different interest and different views, both within the industry, but also Civil Society and, yes, and Civil Society, and overall, we could say that it strikes a good balance. It helps to ensure that the Internet remains open and a engine for innovation. That also will not create problem in terms of future developments of the Internet from the technological point of view, if we consider Internet of Things, this kind of law would really like to promote that on the other hand.
It allows for reasonable traffic management and for written, with this word, reasonable traffic management, what is meant is that considerations should be about technical quality requirements and not commercial considerations. In a way, this is just an example that I think it helps create clarity and certainty for different stakeholders, and it is an example of a positive role that sometimes legislators can have in avoiding Internet fragmentation.
More generally, I would like to stress that the role of stakeholders in Internet governance is at the center of discussion at different venues and different fora. In particular I think it's important to mention the CSTD working group on enhanced cooperation where the role of different stakeholders but in particular the role of governments in discussed, and there the focus is on public policy issues and the role of governments on that.
For us, from my perspective, it's important that clear principles are defined on what we mean, the devil is in the details and how you move forward. So we are still in the process of defining principles and see how they will be implementable. So on the basis of this principle, then we can move forward and address the many issues in Internet Governance including Internet fragmentation.
Talking about these principles, I think that the idea that we should work in a flexible and diverse way should be stressed, again as I was mentioning before, different kind of stakeholders need to cooperate but in different roles, depending on the issues that they have to address.
Of course, it's important that this cooperation is inclusive, responsive, effective, sustainable. These are all principles and also based on evidence, so we need clear facts. We need to know what is the problem and really define the issues very carefully, before any actions are taken, because we know that this could have repercussions on a global level.
Finally, just to stress that also human rights and fundamental freedoms from our perspective should be respected and promoted in any consideration. Thank you.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much. It was very interesting to hear from, not only from the perspective of this topic net neutrality and Internet fragmentation, how important it is to define the roles and responsibilities of the different stakeholders, tackling these issues. I'll get back to you with follow‑up questions as well.
Now, Dr. Arun has joined us. Thanks for joining now. I'm going to go now with Commissioner Clyburn. I have this question for you. What measures can be implemented to avoid discriminatory and/or anti competitive practices among providers of Internet access and content services or applications while being able to protect the privacy and confidentiality of communications by end users and security in the networks.
>> Thank you very much. Very simple question you just posed (chuckles) I thank the Federal Telecommunications Institute for both organizing this workshop and extending the invitation to me to join all of you this morning. I'm in awe of the panel constructs.
Internet fragmentation is concerning to those of us who believe that the Internet is a platform for freedom, expression and innovation. Threats of fragmentation may come from Government actions as we heard from Bill and others that restrict Internet access, commercial practices that impede access to content, or technical conditions that prevent systems from fully functioning. Some of the challenges are global in nature, attempts to undermine the multistakeholder model of Internet Governance, others are national in scope, Government actions that seek to restrict freedom of expression on the Internet while others involve practices that limit access to certain types of content or impact universal connectivity.
All of these challenges pose a threat to the open global and interconnected Internet that has become a key driver of economic and social development, and a platform for individual freedom and democracy. As a FCC Commissioner, I will focus today on steps we took in the United States to prevent commercial practices that could result in Internet fragmentation.
The open Internet order we adopted last year is a reflection of the Federal Communications Commission's long standing commitment to protect and promote a platform that nurtures freedom of speech and expression, supports innovation and commerce, and creates incentives for investment. The fundamental principle behind an open Internet is that consumers should decide not the Government, not the broadband service provider, what users access on line. It is these pay prioritization being at odds with the principle of nondiscrimination that underpin the acts to success of global Internet. The rules also provide mobile parity which means applying rules in the same way to both fixed and mobile Internet service providers. Now, I consider this particular provision especially important, because the majority of low income Americans rely heavily on their mobile devices, and for some that mobile device is their only access to the Internet.
Those individuals should not have to settle for a second class online experience. These mobile users, like everyone else, need and deserve a robust experience on par with the wired peers. Our order sought to advance and protect what we refer to as the virtuous cycle of innovation.
In this cycle new users of the network, including new applications, services and devices, lead to increased end user demand for broadband, that drives in network improvements, which in turn leads to further network uses.
Each round of innovation increases the value of the Internet, for broadband providers, edge providers, online businesses and yes, consumers. This concept is important when understanding the FCC's open Internet order, and how it seeks to foster innovation while avoiding fragmentation that may result from a pay to play market environment.
Absent clear and concrete open Internet rules, any Internet service provider would possess the power to limit free expression and innovation. And ISP could freely block, throttle, favor or discriminate against traffic or extract tolls from any user for any reason, or for no reason at all. Such discriminatory behavior would lead to a fragmentation of the Internet where certain content may be inaccessible to certain citizens, changing the way we value the Internet today.
You may ask me if this is a position based simply on theory. I will answer, no. Providers in the United States have in fact blocked applications on mobile devices, which not only hampers free expression, but restricts competition and dampens innovation, by allowing the companies that control the pipelines and airwaves, not the content creator or consumer, to pick winners and losers.
Much like others here today, the FCC is carefully looking at Zero‑Rating as it pertains to net neutrality. Under the open Internet rules we are taking a look at sponsored data offerings on a case by case basis, as these plans continue to evolve. In short, our rules help ensure that there is only one Internet, where all applications, products, ideas and points of view have an equal chance of being seen and heard and everyone has the same opportunities to succeed. So again, thank you once again for allowing me to join you. I look forward to expanding on this very important topic.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, commissioner. Thank you for sticking to the five minutes. This is very much appreciated. Thank you. But we will follow up with some questions in the second round.
Okay. We will now go with Dr. Arun, and I'm going to ask, what in your point of view are the costs of the Internet fragmentation and what impact could those have on society in general.
>> CHINMAYI ARUN: Thank you for the question. I apologize for being late. I want to encourage everyone who is interested in this to read the World Economic Forum report on fragmentation. I thought it laid down the causes of fragmentation in a beautifully articulated manner. What I'm going to do is run you through some of these causes with examples of what has been happening in India, so that you can get a picture of how, much of what the Commissioner has said applies across the world, but changes a little bit depending on the context that we are talking about.
If you look at Government directed fragmentation, from the point of view of a country like ours, we would be talking in terms of issues like data localization. This is often fueled by what I'm going to uncharitably call Government paranoia which is that data is located in other countries and there are security concerns raised and a lot of countries are beginning to feel like they want more control over data.
Our last articulation of this was interesting, because it was the telecommunications regulator that raised this as an option, in their paper, in their consultation paper about how to regulate cloud computing. One of the questions that they were looking at is that if we are outsourcing data, is it sustainable to require people to host the data in India and so we had to explain to them the kind of impact that that would have on the economy, on innovation, on the security of the data, if you host it in a single place.
But at the same time, the cloud computing paper raised the second question of data privacy, and how do you ensure that, and in the center for communication governance's response we were faced with a bit of a challenge, because Indian privacy law is not very well articulated. Although we are located in a country that broadly recognizes human rights and the right to privacy, we also take the position that human rights cannot be fragmented based on which country and which legal regime individuals are based in.
Our stand is that when we are coming up with regulatory regimes whether they are market oriented or come from nation states, they need to embed the international human rights principles because we say that the right to privacy should be offered to all citizens regardless of what their national governments feel about it.
Our challenge in responding to the regulator was in working out how crossborder regulation of privacy would happen, even in the context of something like cloud computing, and I have to say that it was very difficult and we are grateful for scholars in other countries for developing frameworks. We are still learning.
The other one, other debate which many of you might have heard of in the context of India as well as U.S. is the net neutrality debate. That has been raging in India. We have been closely involved with all of this. Parts of this deal with net neutrality as the Commissioner described beautifully, but the part that we were really interested in is this idea of Zero‑Rated Internet for people that supposedly don't have access to the Internet. In that context, firstly, Commissioner, thank you for that powerful articulation of one Internet for everyone, because we have had to spend the last two years explaining to people around the world that this sort of separate Internet for poor people is not an acceptable idea, that it is not okay to come and tell people from India that you should be grateful that you have access to some part of the Internet, it's better than no Internet.
One of the things that we did and we were delighted that the regulator adopted our response in the end, is we explained to them that the right to freedom of speech and expression in India includes the right to receive information, and that includes the right to receive a diversity of information. It is the responsibility of the regulator to regulate both the markets and the technology in a manner in which this right is preserved.
This is something that the regulator actually adopted in its findings. I know that they are continuing to work on this. If anyone is following the Telecom regulator in India, feel free to write to them, professor's work was great use to us when we were articulating our findings. Our final part, because I should stick to five minutes, I want to point out that parts of this whole connectivity debate lead not just to Internet fragmentation but social fragmentation, on questions of the gender divide, so if you are connecting marginalized people, they have differentiated access to the Internet. But also the people that are online have a fragmented access to the Internet depending on their own capacities, the language that they speak, whether they are literate because that would influence whether they are only looking at video content or not and the spaces in which they can engage because the manner in which the debate is conducted can exclude people, depending on how they talk to each other.
That is something that I'd like to put on the table, because I find that in a lot of fragmentation and access debates, this entire piece of how society engages is lost. I feel like it's worth putting out there. That's it.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, indeed, Dr. Arun. This was excellent. Thank you for entering this new concept of debate on the table.
I'm going to go now to Commissioner Fromo and later to Dr. Layton on purpose because I want to connect one of the questions to the second round of questions. Commissioner, I have this question for you. In terms of net neutrality, how can we differentiate permanent congestion from the temporary and exceptional one? And how to differentiate it from the lack of investment and proper sizing of the networks.
>> Thank you. I would like to thank the invitation to participate in this relevant workshop. It is a pleasure for me to be here and share with you some information regarding net neutrality issues, since the Mexico constitutional reform on telecommunication and broadcasting in 2013. One of the most essential elements of this reform is the human rights approach. From that moment, information and communication technologies as well as broadcasting and telecommunication services, especially broadband and Internet access are seen as a public service, so that Mexican state has a duty of granting the right of access to them and establish the condition for a better competition and providing services. The reform create the federal institute of telecommunication, the IFT, in September 2013, as an autonomous regulatory body self governing, for telecommunication of broadcasting sectors.
The main purpose of the institute is efficient development of broadcasting and telecommunication as well as being the authority in economic competition of these sectors.
This new framework allows the implementation of convergent license to provide all services with nationwide coverage. Regarding to net neutrality issues, it is specified in our secondary law, the federal telecommunication and broadcasting law of 2014, that the ISPs providing Internet access services should comply with the general net neutrality guidelines that IFT plan to issue during the first half of the next year.
About Internet fragmentation, we are analyzing the European Union regulations concerning open Internet access, in order to include some provision in the mentioned guidelines. This European Union regulation specifies that traffic management measures that reasonable management traffic measures may only be applied as necessary and for as long as necessary to comply with justified exception, such as to protect the integrity and security of the networks, for example, by preventing cyber attacks that occur through the spread of malicious softwares or identity theft of end users, that occurs as a result of spyware. Measures going beyond reasonable traffic measurement measures might be necessary to prevent impending network congestion, that this situation where congestion is about to materialize and to mitigate the effects of network congestion, where such congestion occurs only temporarily or in exceptional circumstances.
The principle of proportionality requires that traffic management measures based on that exception treat equivalent categories of traffic equally, temporarily congestion should be understand as referring to a specific situation of short time duration, where, increasing the number of users in addition to the regular user or increasing demand for specific content, application or services may overthrow the transmission capacity of some elements of the network, and make the rest of the network less reactive. Temporarily congestion might occur especially in mobile networks, which are subject to more available conditions such as physical instructions, lower coverage or variable number or active user with changing location. While it may be predictable, that such temporarily congestion might occur from time to time at certain points in the network, such that it cannot be regarded as exceptional, it might not recur so often and for such extensive periods of time that capacity expansion will be economically justified.
Exception in congestion should be understood as referring to predictable and unavailable situation of congestion, both in mobile and fixed networks. Possible causes of those situation include a technical failure, such as service outage due to working cables or other infrastructure elements, unexpected change in routing of traffic, or increase in network traffic due to emergency or other situation beyond the control of providers of Internet access services.
Such congestion problems are likely to be infrequent, but may be severe, and are not necessarily of short duration. The need to apply traffic management measures going beyond reasonable traffic management measures is in order to prevent or mitigate the effects of temporarily or exceptional network congestion should not give providers of network access services, Internet access services the possibility to circumvent the restricting, interfering with, discriminating between specific content application or services or specific categories thereof. More long lasting network congestion which is neither exceptional nor temporary should not benefit from that, but rather expansion of network capacity.
As I mentioned before, it is suspected that IFT issue the general net neutrality guidelines based on the mandate of the federal telecommunication and broadcasting law of 2014, during the first half of 2017, the first half of next year, and we are going to incorporate some provision regarding Internet fragmentation in network congestion situations. In this context, the IFT is committed to provide certainty to the ISP in order to attack investment in telecommunication sectors, so new services, contents and application can be offered to more Mexican users. Thank you.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you, Commissioner, for offering this explanation of where the process is in Mexico, with new information guidelines. I'll come back to you later. But now we have Dr. Layton and I want to ask you something that I think can be very useful in terms of having also present here two or three experiences of net neutrality rules. But you have studied this net neutrality rules around the world.
What can you say about the outcomes from your research of the different regimes?
>> Good morning, everyone. Before I go into my remarks, I want to take a moment to thank the IFT for the invitation, it's very kind of you, delighted to be a part of the panel. I want to congratulate the IFT on three years of becoming a converged regulator. This was really a tremendous activity you have gone through, to bring together different sector regulators into one, so congratulations to you for that. And also, you are in the midst of building, if I'm not mistaken, one of the world's largest mobile networks. You have made an award for your wholesale mobile wireless network. All of us are going to be watching that. Congratulations as well.
I'm with a university in Copenhagen Denmark, I'm a proud member of the Dynamic Coalition on net neutrality. Please join us tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. where we will release the fourth report of the Coalition, and I think that this discussion of fragmentation, it has been one of the things that we have talked about over the years and we are looking into that.
What I would like to offer is just a summary of my research on net neutrality rules around the world. Where I have looked at the, some 50 countries that have rules and the different legal instruments used to make rules, and trying to see which types of regimes do the best job to deliver the promised outcomes. Specifically I've been looking at mobile networks and application level innovation, so mobile apps.
What I'm interested to see is that which country has, since they put the rules in place, which country does the best job to increase the level of mobile app innovation. So we can see in the world amongst these 50 countries, we have countries with soft rules, hard rules and no rules. Soft rules are multistakeholder models, as we use here at the IGF. Self regulation, codes of conducts, principles. We have countries with hard rules which is of course legislation through the will of the people, and of course regulation.
We have countries with no rules, not that they are not contemplating them, but there is nothing specifically as such about net neutrality.
Because we have such a diversity and heterogeneity amongst the countries, I wanted to look specifically at two similar countries but with very different rules. I have looked at Denmark and Netherlands because they are very advanced, have lots of networks but they chose very different approaches at roughly the same time.
For example, Denmark said in 2011 we want self‑regulation, the Telecom operator said we don't want to be regulated, so we will agree to principles that are even tougher than net neutrality rules. We will promise equality guarantee, they wanted to get ahead of what the regulations were. Of course we know about the Netherlands which has made a law and subsequently toughened the law, making restrictions on Zero‑Rating and so on. What is interesting is, five years later, if we look at the amount of apps produced in these particular countries, there are more apps made today in Denmark than in Netherlands and significantly so.
This is the opposite of what I had expected. The Danish apps are used globally, they have, this would not seem ‑‑ it is contradictory to what you would think, because the Dutch sit on a Internet exchange, they have lots of peering points and so on. But the Danes have succeeded to produce world leading apps and games and in health and content and so forth, and in fact the largest Danish app today has more traffic revenue and downloads than the top 20 largest Dutch apps. This is a very odd outcome, when you looked at the types of net neutrality rules chosen.
What is the difference here? Because both of the countries have similar networks. When you look closely, it turns out that Denmark has post paid data rates at one third higher than the Netherlands. That is very odd. Why should you care? If you are an app developer, you want to make sure that there is a lot of 3G and 4G networks in your country, because if you are an app maker, you want to have people with smart phones who are going to use those networks. The Danes have succeeded to get more post paid subscriptions in the marketplace at a higher rate, one third higher. Why was this? This is because there is greater commercial freedom in Denmark. The operators for a long time had more freedom in how they sold their subscriptions, they could partner, the mobile operators can partner with content providers to create local packages relevant for the particular marketplace. That is not allowed in the Netherlands. All the operators that try to do that were fined.
There is a kind of a chilling effect on the innovation that would be interesting for the particular end users.
In any case, I'm continuing in the research, because there is still a lot of unanswered questions. For example, we have a lot of innovation today that comes from countries with no net neutrality rules, China, Russia, Belarus, we are increasingly using Chinese apps. It doesn't follow this idea that we have that innovation is only coming from places where there is strong open Internet rules.
The other thing that doesn't follow what the expectation is that many of the Latin‑American countries which made hard rules years ago have not succeeded to produce the global apps that we use every day. This is a real concern for a lot of Latin‑American countries. The traffic in their countries is 991, 99 percent of their traffic goes to apps in foreign countries. The revenue leaves their country. They are not using apps they make themselves. This is really odd because we believe if we have hard net neutrality rules it should be easier for the app makers in those countries to get their apps up.
In any case, what I would like to say, at least my preliminary conclusion is, if we want to resolve this concern we have about fragmentation, we should go back to multistakeholder models for net neutrality. We practiced this with the IGF, every day. This is proven for Internet Governance overall. One of the things we have seen in countries with soft rules is that there is no litigation. Real challenge with countries with hard rules is we have lots of litigation, that is a lot of money being sucked away from investment.
Clearly, the multistakeholder is a place where we have a lot of experience, we have a lot of practice, and that can be helpful to manage these issues going forward.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Dr. Layton. We are going to start now the second round of questions. I'm going to ask the panelists one follow‑up question. I'm going to ask you, please, to keep it to two or three minutes at the most, so that we can open the floor for conversation. Now I'm going to start backwards. I'm going to start with you, Dr. Layton, if you don't mind. It is interesting because you were sharing some of the let's say indicators of how success may look like after enacting some sort of regulation or sub regulation around net neutrality. You were seeing, exposing the case of the number of applications.
What are the indicators do you think can tell us how successful a introduction of some sort of regulation on net neutrality could be?
>> ROSLYN LAYTON: Thank you for that question. One of the, I think it's very interesting and I'm glad we started out with Dr. Drake to beginning, what is fragmentation, and we had a great panel yesterday on community networks, which was a fascinating discussion, about different communities and building their networks.
One of the key issues, I think, we are all, we want to get more networks, make them more available. But we need to remember that people don't adopt networks. They adopt services over networks. And that one of the important issues that we need to start with, what are the services that people need? There will be great research later today looking at these kinds of measures. They are probably the best, they have a lot of, they will present some good data. But one thing that I want to mention to follow up on some other research I've done with Zero‑Rating, I've looked at free basics in a number of countries, and particularly in the areas of mobile health. I've identified ten million net new users who adopted free basics for their M health capabilities. People in Africa who are using it for, if they are having AIDS, women, pregnant women who are using, this one particular app, because that is their only means to get healthcare.
This is cases where you have a real challenge where people need to check, is there AIDS medicine fake, and they are using apps, using these free apps to do that.
In terms of a measure of whether the net neutrality rule is working, it will depend upon what you value as important. If in fact you say that more people today are getting healthcare online, shouldn't that be more important than whether we have net neutrality rules. We have a great example in a Colombian app where people are able to ask a health question. They are using this through Zero‑Rated platforms.
These are people who have never seen doctors in their lives before. They are being able to access free data to do that. What I would take the step back and say, what are we trying to maximize first? What is the social goal that we want to realize? Do we want to have more people get healthcare online, to get a job online, to be able to check weather information, to me that is the more important goal to maximize than what kind of a net neutrality rule do I have and how effective is it. Should be looking at the top line social goals that we want to realize.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Roslyn. Now I'm going to ask Commissioner Fromo, so it has been said that it's very important to, whenever a country is discussing net neutrality and Internet fragmentation to involve and encourage the participation from different stakeholders.
Could you share with us how has been, how has the process been in Mexico in terms of interacting with other stakeholders, and if you can just share as well main concerns they had regarding the guidelines that you are trying to put forward.
>> The IFT thinks that having a multistakeholder approach is a very important issue, in order to study a new regulation, mainly in this area of Internet Governance. So we also, according to our law, the secondary law, the article 51 studies that for the issuance and amendment of rules, guidelines or general administration, administrative provisions, the IFT shall carry out public consultation under the principle of transparency and citizen participation, and the institute shall prepare and make public an analysis of regulatory impact. Also the institute shall have space between its Internet portal, specifically designated to publish and maintain updated, the process of public consultation and a calendar of the consultation to be made. The answer or proposal made to the institution shall not be binding without prejudice to the institute considered them in a document that reflects the results of such consultation.
Therefore, it means that we are going to consider serially what are the requirements and the proposal of industry, academic and Civil Society in this topic in order to set the corresponding regulatory policies.
But in the net neutrality environment, in Mexico, we have to decide among other issues if we are going to permit Zero‑Rating for some specific application or contents, and under what kind of circumstances, but not only for commercial application, but also for example for financial inclusion or educational application. One of our major mobile service providers, broadband mobile broadband service provider in Mexico is already offering educational application using Zero‑Rating approach.
Also in Mexico, the two major mobile operators are offering Zero‑Rating for such application, Twitter and Facebook, we have to make a decision to formally permit it or prohibit it. Also I'm wondering if the same net neutrality rules or regulation should apply in developed countries and developing countries. We have to analyze that, and we are going to issue the guidelines that are mandated by our secondary laws.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Commissioner. I'll go to Dr. Arun for a follow‑up question. You mentioned the concept of Government paranoia. What have been in your opinion something that the process where different stakeholders can do to give this peace of mind to governments and avoid this kind of paranoia?
>> CHINMAYI ARUN: I think transparency and accountability go a long way in allaying everyone's paranoia, not just governments.
I know that the big, one of the big trigger points that is probably familiar to everyone is when the Snowden revelations happened. Now this was information that took a lot of people by surprise, and they reacted saying that, hey, there are some countries with this extra access to data, they are spying on us, and so we need to protect our data.
The best way around it really is if governments and large companies can come to an agreement ideally with soft rules, in which there is transparent as possible and they create appeal mechanisms if possible, so that all major stakeholders have a sense of, not just that they know what is going on with their data or data that they have an interest in, but also that they have some recourse, if there is a practice that they disagree with. I know that Rebecca has been doing a lot of work towards this, the Internet and Jurisdiction Project is doing work towards this. I feel like if the global network initiative is another space where this is happening, if we succeed and we create this framework, it will build trust, and there will be less paranoia will be my thinking.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Dr. Arun. Besides the case of Mexico, we have two pragmatic cases now, the one in the United States and the one in the European Union. I'm going to more or less ask you the same question. I'm going to go first with Commissioner Clyburn and also a little bit in the sense of what I asked Dr. Layton is, how do we measure success? How are you measuring success in the United States, for example, of the FCC? Can we consider that this has been a successful measure already? How enforceable are these rules? Are they easy to follow? How can you really see if some of the carriers or others are not following them?
>> I'll answer it, I jokingly say and I shouldn't joke at a international conference because what is funny to me is not going to be funny to three‑quarters of the room, but I say when somebody asks you a question, you answer it like a debutante the way you want to answer, that might not be funny to some people who are not debutantes or maybe it would not be funny to a person who is not a debutante. I approach it this way. I appreciate the sequence in which you ask. Everything is a building block to what I know that you will say more eloquently. But I'll give it a shot.
When I heard you talk about, and I think it's very appropriate, that people do not adapt or adopt networks, they adopt services over the networks. To me that is the driving force behind what is so incredible about our open Internet order. The first thing is going to seem obvious to you. But I'll say it anyway because sometimes obvious is not clear. We all need a solid understanding of how broadband markets and networks work.
Simple words, but when I talked about that virtual cycle of innovation, and what the cause and effects are, if you didn't have all of this Internet content and applications and services, you wouldn't have all of this investment and expansion and hope and promise around the world. The second thing is that based on what you said, Dr. Arun, you seem like a doctor if you are not, that we need protective rules to guard against the harmful conduct we know today. We know that fear often especially in the United States with seniors, fear is one, second to affordability, is a number one barrier for a number of people going online.
We need to make sure that we are the cop on the beat. We shouldn't apologize for that as regulators, to offend the other part of the room that might be companies here. I don't apologize for that because it's beneficial to all of us.
Finally, we need flexibility when it comes to standards and authority in order to address problems when they arise. There is no way at this point in time that we can predict what is to come and what is expected or what, we are talking about 5G and the Internet of Things, back home. There is no way that every little line and footnote in our open Internet order would anticipate what the future would hold. All of the things that we are talking about, no throttling, no pay prioritization, no blocking, flexible standards, and a understanding of markets and what it will further enable, I think, are, for me, are the preamble so to speak of our open Internet order.
I might have gone over two minutes. But I think you will forgive me today.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
The same question goes to you, Cristina Monti, in the case of the European Union.
>> CRISTINA MONTI: Thank you. I agree with many of the things you just said. Of course it's all a matter of striking the right balance between different interests, and if we compare also the approach that the European Union and the U.S. have had, overall we want to keep the Internet open and free. It was also interesting to hear that there are data and evidence showing that sometimes hard regulation, or I'm sorry, rules on, hard rules on net neutrality are not allowing strong innovation.
On the other hand, I also know that OECD is working a lot on collecting data and they are collecting evidence showing that openness of the Internet is leading to strong innovation. So it would be interesting, I think that also, so one thing is striking the right balance between different interests, another important thing is collecting data and evidence, and understanding really the situation on the ground.
In terms, of course, the European Union recent legislation, it's really recent so now it will have to be put to the test, main difference I think is that in our case, in the European Union it is really a law, so it went through all the legislative process, European Parliament, council of ministers. So very long process.
But it gives a real right to the end user. How are we going to implement that. Here, of course in Europe we have a special situation. We are a union of different member states. And in each member states we have a national regulators. And they will have the primary responsibility to monitor and enforce compliance with the open Internet rules.
So these authorities will have the power and obligation to examine how the traffic management practices of Internet services providers affect the end users, both consumers and businesses.
So they will have the special role. One additional remark if I may. I think when we talk about Internet fragmentation, we should also keep in mind that some forms of fragmentation might be positive, like for instance those that are necessary to ensure privacy, to ensure that we protect vulnerable users like children or those to fight hate speech online.
I wanted to pinpoint to that. Finally also I think we should strive to avoid what we define as jurisdictional fragmentation, where all different governments in the world go into different directions. It is very hard. But we will have to make an effort maybe in discussions like those that we have here at the IGF to ensure some sort of interoperability in our rules.
Finally I'm also glad that the Mexicans are looking at the rules that we developed in Europe. So we are also have formal dialogues and discussions to advance on these issues, and if there are any clarifications on information or help that we might provide, we are at your disposal. Thank you.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much. We are going to go with Bill Drake very quickly before we open the floor to questions. So, Bill, one of the things that Cristina Monti addressed at the end you mentioned in your presentation also. I wanted to follow up on that as well. Maybe you can expand a little bit. You also said that there is some kind of unintentional intervention and some other kind of intervention that can be positive.
So Cristina mentioned that of privacy, but what other kinds of interventions or what kind of fragmentations could be considered as positive in your point of view, Bill?
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Actually, I think it's sort of in a way being a little bit elastic with the term, when I think about fragmentation as being something that prevents willing end points from communicating, it's a little harder to identify the really positive aspects of any kind of intervention that precludes that. But nevertheless, we do want to recognize that the Internet is not a completely wide open space, and that people do choose to say, I'm not willing. That is to say, we all have firewalls. We all use or many people use VPNs and other things, that segment themselves off, encryption, etcetera, that make you that sort of like close your door to the big outside world. We don't allow all bits to come through, in a unmitigated way. I guess you could view that as a kind of positive fragmentation.
But again, I'm using the word in a kind of expansive manner in that sense.
I want to flag one other point though. There were a lot of very interesting interventions. I really enjoyed all the comments that were being made. But a number of people have noted that the solution, or part of the solution is we need multistakeholder dialogue and so on, so forth.
I guess I want to underscore that in a way, because I think sometimes particularly in the IGF context it becomes very easy for everybody to sing the praise of multistakeholder cooperation, as if it was the panacea that solves all problems. But of course it doesn't necessarily. Cooperation, certainly those of us who are heavily involved in ICANN can tell you that decision‑making that has concrete distributional outcomes for particular actors can be very difficult to undertake in a multistakeholder setting. It is not that necessarily going to be any easier than a intergovernmental one. Nevertheless there is a point that has to be recognized.
Openness that is going to be sustainable, in this kind of environment, I think does require the buy‑in and implementation efforts of people outside the state sector. You just can't, the Internet environment is one in which the private sector, technical communities, Civil Society and other organizations play too important a role. I watch a lot of these processes, G7, G8, G20, OECD and so on, where they are talking about the importance of preserving a open Internet and avoiding fragmentation and I'm glad they are saying that. But they are not fully engaging the range of stakeholders that are relevant to the problem in a collective problem solving kind of activity.
I hope that we can find a way to actually make multistakeholder cooperation more practically salient and useful in addressing these problems. It's something we are doing as a follow‑up to the fragmentation paper we are now doing, further work on data localization and barriers to transborder data flows with a eye towards trying to build that multistakeholder cooperation.
I want to flag that point. I think the multistakeholder is important, but we have to keep in mind that it's not easy and the solutions are not always evident. Thanks.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much, Bill. We are going to open the floor for questions and comments. Please introduce yourself briefly before asking the question or making a comment. We are going to alternate also with remote participation. We are going to start here.
>> Telefonica. Hello to everyone. Interesting debate. I want to highlight one issue, one of Zero‑Rating. We have various views on Zero‑Rating. I think Zero‑Rating is a complex concept. There are so many different ways of doing Zero‑Rating. There has nothing to do, Zero‑Rating of video service in a developed market like Germany, with Zero‑Rated service in Africa, there are lots of ways of doing Zero‑Rating. Zero‑Rating would have no results whatsoever. You have to discuss specific market situation, and specific application of Zero‑Rating. That is the first comment.
The second is what strikes me, thanks very much to Roslyn for highlighting it, we are discussing this concept of net neutrality for years now. This is my 7th IGF. Every year we have net neutrality debate. But we never come back with data. We always stick to the concept, and the good idea and the what‑if debate. That is good but where is the data? Has anyone looked at what is happening in markets after net neutrality regulation, have you looked at markets where there is no net neutrality regulation. We have to base it on data and data is not there. I would like to highlight that. It is a very important issue.
Having said that, to come back to one point, I think Cristina Monti raised, the European laws have passed a debate of three years through all kinds of Parliaments, governments, including governments like the Dutch and others who have more liberal view on that. They have come to a very good balance on net neutrality. I would invite people to look at it, because it is a very extensive process and it has come to a interesting result, which by the way is not prohibiting Zero‑Rating, also to highlight that. Okay?
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: The gentleman over there raised a hand and then I'm going over there and here and probably there. If there is a remote question, please ‑‑ so we go to (overlapping speakers).
>> My name is Alan, I'm here with privacy fundamentals.org, a new player looking to promote privacy and security through best practices through transparency and accountability attention, formerly in‑house counsel with Comcast and before that I worked with AOL and also PBS. I've played on various sides of this issue, over time.
My question really is for Commissioner Clyburn and the panel in general. I think there is a lot of unintended consequence that is sometimes come from the regulatory attempts, well‑intentioned as they are, to promote an open Internet and net neutrality.
There are real cost of carriage of data when large players, content providers are pushing a tremendous amount of data through the networks, there are real costs to building out the infrastructure to make that happen. By mandating no cost to the content providers from the ISP for coverage, aren't you really choosing who charges the end user for the real cost of building out the network?
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you. Commissioner Clyburn, you want to react to that?
>> I'll react officially in one way and talk to you in another way. That is my motto. What I'll say is, going back to what we said earlier about how every action has either a positive or negative consequence, I yield to what you said but I also say when you construct and use it's like when I look at this, ecosystem, I go back to my old days of state regulation, when I was doing more energy and one of the things that I always, I keep in mind here too is when we were doing natural gas, and you had to build that conduit, that pipe so to speak that could be huge, one of the things that we did was have a different sort of construct for I would say the industrial customers. They paid less than we did. It wasn't fair from that seemingly that standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint. But the benefit accrued and accumulated along the way.
I say to you, I hear what you are saying. We will talk more off‑line. But the benefits I counter to you are positive, along the way. You might have to build and support more. But I will say to you that that will come to you, who you used to represent, and who you might still represent, as a positive economic consequence, because if you can do more, you can offer more enable more. I think that investment is well worth it.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: We have Carlos? Do you ‑‑
>> Hello, I'm from defense network, based in Mexico City. I have two questions, one for Dr. Roslyn. You establish in your data about Netherlands and Denmark, the point as far as I understood is that the app, applications production was linked to net neutrality rules, soft and hard. But I don't understand what the link on apps production towards the regulation exactly.
I know that net neutrality argument has said that protects innovation, but I don't think that is a major force for applications production. The second one is for Commissioner Fromo, well, of course the IFT in Mexico, we expect to have not copy/paste of other regulations from other countries, but we are dealing with human rights, and the designs of regulators in the world is very different. Mexico regulator is particularly different. Net neutrality legislations comes in Mexico from the freedom of expression article in the constitution and state obligations of every single state are different as well. The assessment has to be made to bring the rules, in the case of Mexico maybe we will have to take into account the human rights necessary considerations, that I think we have started to do in introducing human rights language.
Can we agree that Mexico will have to take as the center human rights obligations that comes from the legal framework that net neutrality has?
>> Carlos, we still have one more question but I'll go with Mario and if you want to briefly telegraphically reply to Carlos.
>> Thank you very much for the question. As I say, one of the most essential elements of the constitutional reform on telecommunication and broadcasting in 2013 is the human rights approach. From that moment Internet is seen as a public service. So the Mexican state has guaranteed the right of access to these services.
It was mentioned, the IFT is working for three years, and in all the decision, not only on the Internet related issues but in all decisions that we took the human rights approach and the human rights obligation, this is the center of our decisions, always. The customer, the audience is in the center of all the decision of the IFT, and that will be the case for net neutrality guidelines, it will be there in that case because we know that this Internet, human rights to be applied in that way. Thank you.
>> Dr. Layton.
>> So Carlos, thank you for the question. I'm happy to speak with you after, if I don't satisfy, give you a satisfying answer.
But let me say as a policy researcher, I'm interested to see, can we make rules and laws that achieve their objective. For example, the European net neutrality law says, the purpose of this law is to guarantee the Internet as a source of innovation. That is very strong language. It suggests that the European lawmakers apparently know something that nobody else does, and that they know that this particular choice of an instrument will create more innovation.
If you will study innovation, we don't have good measures of innovation. We talk about it in general. But if you look around the world, we don't have very hard measures of innovation. It seems a little bit of a stretch, if we don't measure innovation. We can also assert net neutrally assures innovation, we don't have great measures for those things. The only reason I'm looking at apps is because it's a proxy because we don't have anything else.
I'm starting, my starting point is Barbara who talked about we need to put the importance on application innovation is more important than network innovation. We may beg to differ because if you are working with a one megabit DSL network and suddenly you have a 4G network, you might say perhaps I prefer network level innovation. Storage might be important. Semiconductors, all that network level innovation might matter.
But the lawmakers in this case are saying that they are favoring the application innovation that it's a guarantee. I would say fine, I take your points. Let's see that the evidence will show it.
In any case, let me wrap up this point here, if we accept that the Internet is an ecosystem and if we study ecosystems we know that all parts of the ecosystem must interact. There is a disconnect in creating rules that constrain one part of the ecosystem. They all need to interact together and in a complementary way, symbiotic way. That is my point of struggle, that rules that say we are going to suppress an important actor in the system, so that the other one can flourish, well, in natural systems when you do that, it creates havoc in your natural ecosystem.
The point here is simply to say, pricing flexibility, I know we get lost in the Zero‑Rating discussion, the point is if we, I'm glad you all like my point about we adopt networks for the services, not the networks. If we adopt it for the services, then we should price the services flexibly. The idea of treating all the data the same is at odds with the notion of valuing the services for their value, if it's health service we want to maximize, right, if it is entertainment, whatever, we should allow the markets to work to price those things flexibly so we maximize the social goals.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much. One quick last question from the lady next to the camera.
>> Good morning. I'm Veronica, I come from Peru IGF. My point, as you know Peru has no regulation on net neutrality. We were discussing this last year. We tried to pass a law on net neutrality but at the end law is, we don't have nothing now. We try to arise this into the ground. What is happening. We had this year a phenomenon Pokemon Go that was popular for everyone. We want all to have this free, for free to use, our mobile friends doesn't have to pay anything for that. And competition goes well with this. The groups on Facebook, asking mobile companies to give us free Pokemon Go and it happens. First, one company, the next day it was the other company. That is competition.
For us it's completely great, because we are having Pokemon Go free. The problem is that regulation, on net neutrality, in my country, was built on the idea that the Government or the national authority needs to say, yes to this program or yes to this Zero‑Rating program that they are trying to launch, and that takes a lot of time. If the authority will take three weeks, four weeks, then who is losing? We are losing. That is my point. Thank you.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Thank you very much for your question. We have reached the end of the time, and thanks for showing that the youth is here making the next generation questions. We are happy to have you here.
Finally, I would like to thank you, most of all, for the IFT for organizing such a great panel. Also for being very good at choosing the panelists. They were fantastic. Amazing, all of you. Thank you very much for being engaged. Thank you, thank you all of you, and let's give them a round of applause.
(applause).
(end of session at 10:35 a.m. CST)