The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. 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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>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Paris. This is the station for the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition, and we are here to create a new agenda, an exciting agenda, and a timely agenda, which is why we have many speakers who will speak briefly also so that we can create a 360 degree agenda that actually integrates understandings of sustainable futures, the Internet, human rights, and all that we mean by the environment, our built environment and our natural environment.
At every point in the timeline of computers, of internet networks, electricity is consumed, precious minerals are mined from the depths of the earth, plastics are engaged, silicone is needed. Networks create energy. They emit heat. They need cooling. The more we use the cloud, the more we need data centers, and the bigger those data centers are becoming, the more electricity they need, the more heat they produce, and on it goes.
We have here an extraordinary range of speakers and agendas. We want to not just consider the natural environment, but also the future of our cities as they become increasingly networked and increasingly dependent on computing and Internet‑based networks.
Again, electricity is needed. Heat is emitted. At all times we need to consider what about the citizens of our countries and the residents of our cities, the poorest of the poor who are in need of food and shelter, the richest of the rich. All the promises of broadband and all those things, these imply an environment. The natural environment and the built environment. That's why we are very excited here to talk about human rights, sustainable futures, and anything that we think relates to Internet policymaking.
My name is Marianne Franklin. I'm co‑chair of the Internet Principles Coalition.
To my right is Linda, who is the co‑chair. She's going to be time‑keeper and moderating and keeping us all on track, and each speaker will be introduced as we go. We have government. We have activism. We have technical community.
We only have an hour. Please, this is a new agenda we are forming, so we are keeping this on to the record. That is our objective today; to collate and see where the points of commonality are and where there might be divergences. Just think, a very first metal that is taken out of the ground in the Central Republic of the Congo, to the last piece of plastic that might be floating in the Pacific Ocean and finding itself on the beaches that are also going under water because of global warming. This is a huge set of connections, and human rights are at the heart of all of this.
Thank you for coming. We'll now turn to our first speakers. I think we'll start with IT for Change, and she will say more about her affiliation. Everybody has three minutes. Thank you very much.
>> DEEPTI BHARTHUR: Thank you. I'm senior research associate with IT for Change. We're a research and advocacy organization based out of India, and our focus has always been at looking at the intersections of technology and looking at paradigms which focus and come from the global self.
In terms of my take on sustainability, I'm drawing from research that we are currently undertaking. It's a 12 to 14 country research that we are doing across the globe in various places, and we're looking at the rise of digital platforms. It's a good time to be speaking about this, you know, at the IGF.
We just came out with our mid‑project reflections where we were able to look at what the policy landscape is telling us about the rise of digital platforms, about the rise of the digital economy. I'm happy to sort of pull from that to talk about our sustainability.
I think the opening points are very sort of sets the stage very well because I think there's a myth about the digital economy. It's pervasive. The idea that, you know, nothing need be owned, but everything is controlled, and everything is consolidated, and these many, many invisible layers that are underneath and especially the highly disastrous consequences of the culture that we fail to see is essentially I think a new form of, you know, the whole idea of capitalism has always had the idea of business practices that are brutal and often end up hurting the most marginalized and the most vulnerable of geographies and people.
With the economies, this is getting more and more hidden. Especially when we consider this myth of likeness where nobody owns anything. It's pervasive because it borrows from very, very positive discourses. The idea of collaborative consumption, the idea of the economy which actually kind of responds to the 2008 financial crisis, to the idea of really looking at excesses of capitalism and sort of finding a way back to more sustainable consumption, to more sustainable patterns of consumer behavior, to sort of like sharing what we have. Not consuming more than what's needed, and the concern of that, which is admirable has today become what we know is the platform economy, what we know is large technology giants. This is the default model of the paradigm.
To me I think sustainability is not just about environment and ecology, but it ultimately sits on many different layers of policy gap that is we've managed to observe through our research. The fact that there is so much work, the fact that social protections are especially in the global south are so poor and so unable to respond to the rise of these kinds of movements, the fact that we have data framework that is are completely caught up in a certain idea about free data flows. Without really understanding about the need that any future that is sustainable is ultimately any future that is local. Has to privilege local innovation. Has to fall with local innovation. That's basically where we are at, and I will pass the next on.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you for keeping to time. We are going from South Asia, and I think it's very suitable that we then move ever so slightly to the South Pacific. I have great pleasure in introducing Maureen Hilyard. The floor is yours for three minutes. Thank you.
>> MAUREEN HILYARD: Thank you. Well, environmental issues, of course, are always going to impact on small stacks, and it's really important that we make like a real effort to insure that the sustainability in respect to our island environments are sort of maintained. Within the Pacific we've got islands that actually range from 1,500 population to 7 million. There's actually a wide range of connectivity issues that need to be dealt with. In relation to the small economies, you have affordability issues where countries with small populations are having to pay a lot more for their internet than some of the larger islands, although, for example, Papua New Guinea has infrastructure being put up and vandalized by people who are not aware of what the internet has yet. They don't have connectivity, and there are sort of, like, a lot of cultural issues that need to be dealt with.
This is really important. With regards to our little island, a population of 14,000 people, you know, we have issues relating to tourism. Tourism is our mainstay of our economy, and so what we've got is the impacts not only sort of like with regards to natural with climate change, but also with human impact.
The plastics issue was something that was mentioned.
There is also the issue of governments wanting to expand and taking over valuable land for wetlands and forest areas that, you know, we need to be protecting for the future of our future generations, but, you know, this becomes an economic issue.
Renewable energy is something that is quite important in regards to sort of, like, cutting down on fossil fuels, but at the same time I know we'll have a whole lot of batteries that will be waiting to be sent somewhere because we can't sustain them on our island.
Again, there are issues that we need to be looking at now to actually look at the sustainable future.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much, Maureen. If I could just underscore very important point with tourism. You get uneven levels of access and uneven levels of band width and speed, so that certain sectors of the population or tourism get the level that we are all used to and the rest of the populist has to put up with no access or band width. It's these inequalities that become structural if we do not take into account the implicit right to access and implicit right to all the other human rights we have, which are now online.
As a means of continuity, I would like to move ‑‑ I think the best next segue, Michael Oghia. He is our pioneer in getting this topic on to Internet Governance Forum. Thank you, Michael.
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: That's very kind of you. I don't know if that's true. Why are we talking about this here? A lot of times when I was bringing up the fact we need to talk more about sustainability, people would say what does it have to do with the internet? Why are we talking about that at the IGF? The fact is, first of all, if anybody has read the IPCC Report that just came out, we have about 12 to 13 years to fix our problem with the earth.
That's really a significant problem that we're dealing with now. Sorry to be that guy in the room that's saying ‑‑ that's talking about it, but it's something we can’t bury our heads in the sand.
Number two is that access to information, access to internet is such a key ‑‑ such a key human right, but at the same time we cannot legitimately discuss access unless we talk about sustainability.
As Maureen pointed out, there are so many elements to the internet that relates to the environment, to energy, to things like climate change, et cetera, sustainable consumption production.
In fact, there are so many links within the SDG's between energy and infrastructure and sustainable consumption and production, but there is not actually any explicit kind of link within the language of the SDGs themselves to pull together energy and infrastructure, et cetera.
Essentially, it's not mentioned. It's not talked about hardly anywhere. That is a key gap. It's a key problem.
The fact that we want to situate sustainability within a human rights lens, I think that's not necessarily just important, but that's really something that we should have been doing years ago.
Just to give you a little bit of information, ICT electricity use based on estimates from a year or two ago placed ICTs at 10% of global electricity use. It's not just the energy powering our homes. It's also the fact that, you know, about 2% to 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions are coming straight from ICTs, and that's only growing.
To give you a better even more ‑‑ a better landscape of it, basically with the rise of machine to machine communication, with the rise of internet of things, et cetera, the amount of data we're producing each year is practically exponential. The fact is think about how many people alone, me included, watch high definition video. It takes more and more energy just to power those basic, you know, things that we who have been on the Internet continue to use, but especially something to consider whenever we're talking about getting more people online.
How with we doing that? Thankfully, when we talk about the people that are not connected at the moment, already, you know, as it exists, about one billion people in the world still don't have access to reliable energy, much less to the Internet, you know, or to mobile connectivity.
These are all interrelated, and I'll just wrap up by saying the solution to it -- the solution to all of this is really, really critical. It's something that involves multi‑stakeholder collaboration. We need supply chain overviews. We need to look at how recyclability of the materials that we're using, whether it be fiber or, you know, even something ‑‑ something like, you know, things like E‑waste, et cetera. These are all things that involve collaboration at every level, private sector, government, society, and it's really important that we as individuals, as members of civil society, hold both ourselves as well as the wider community accountable. It's our earth, and we are ruining it.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks so much, Michael. I'm going to bring us to the last of the first round of speakers. I just want to remind everyone that if you have a point to make, a fact to give, a concrete suggestion to offer, with he will open it up to the floor shortly, and our speakers will then have another round.
Just want to remind you that Article One of the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet stresses that everyone has the right to access and make use of internet technologies. That includes freedom of choice, system and software use. That includes insuring digital inclusion and also the principles of net neutrality and net equality. As our cities and our towns become more and more plugged into this large network, as Michael points out, becomes more and more needy of our energy and more and more generous of what ‑‑ what's the word, produces as heat, we need to consider the issues of rights, sustainability and cities.
It's my great pleasure to introduce ‑‑ from the city of Amsterdam. He will talk about a brand new coalition that our coalition has been very proud to be a part of. This new digital cities coalition. The floor is yours. Thank you very much.
>> JIM PUCKETT: Thanks, Marianne. I'm an international advisor for the city of Amsterdam. As a city, we definitely see all the benefits that digitalization brings, but we have to voice some concerns about the social and environmental impact. We must regulate digitalization as well. In the city all these factors, environmental, social, digital really come together.
We are, of course, the closest Democratic institution to citizens, to communities. We have to deal with the consequences of the rights violations, of pollution, and the data centers that were already mentioned and the data used is going through data centers, which are for large parts also located around cities, and, of course, we also have certain obligations as cities to manage public space, to set standards for companies, for data centers, for example. We can use our public procurement. When we buy certain services and goods, we can set standards for companies. Of course, we have an obligation to protect vulnerable communities as well. Digital rights are very high on our city agenda as well. Data sovereignties mentioned explicitly by our city governments.
Inclusion is mentioned specifically. Open source and open data standards and digital rights are explicitly mentioned as a form of civil rights by our city government.
I already mentioned the data centers, and we also try to invest in projects to research how we can limit the impact of data centers. We are researching possibilities to pump water to the data centers, to use this water for cooling, and to use the heated water to feed it back into ‑‑ we call it the heat, so to speak. To warm houses, et cetera. We invested in research setting up international standards for procurement for data centers as well. Well, value added plans, which are a way to recalculate energy use.
The latest is that in a few days, in Barcelona, at the City Conference we will launch the City Coalition for Digital Rights, which is really based on the Coalition for the Charter for Human Rights and Principles for the Internet. It's Barcelona, New York, and Amsterdam, and we are trying to kickstart this movement, and we're trying to make it a worldwide movement under the umbrella of the U.N.
You know, we would like to have at least 100 cities join us in the first year. The goal is to learn from each other, of course, and to develop actions like the ones I mentioned, but also to set a standard and to make statements the launch will be on Wednesday, and that's the most important thing to pass on a message that the digitalization is great. The internet is great. It brings many benefits, and also, it's aware of just like human rights in this context.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. Just to underscore the important move forward in this collaboration is more people on this planet now live in cities than do not live in cities. Those three cities are going to put their best foot forward in terms of are these connections. I would like to open it up to the floor.
Please, this is an open mike session in many ways. We are trying to get as many issues on to the first agenda as possible so that in the next outing we can focus. Please, if you take the mike, please say your name and your affiliation.
The floor is all yours. Who would like to make a contribution or comment on any of the comments made so far? Don't be shy. I know it's one of the first sessions and we're not warmed up yet. We won't bite.
Thank you, Joanna.
>> AUDIENCE: I work at the University of Lutz. I will stick to the university affiliation. I always appreciate Michael's ‑‑ I always appreciate -- should I introduce myself again? All right. It's Joanna. I work at the University in Lutz, which is in Poland. I also appreciate Michael's environmental take on human rights, and I wanted to dig on that a little bit more.
I remember us meeting at various venues. There are various aspects to the environment of human rights. I wonder if you might be willing to explore that context. Here's one of the aspects. I'll be happy to hear more about environmental aspects of human rights. Particularly, whether it comes to the environmental protection, air, et cetera, et cetera. I'm happy to specify that question further, but I think you know what I'm looking at, and I'm happy to elaborate on other issues that are related to environment and human rights. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Can we just get one or two more questions or comments? Thank you very much, Joanna.
>> YVONNE: I'm from the Ministry of Communications. Constitution for Human Rights and this constitution we mentioned an addition of the rights, the limitation and the protection of the human from the ‑‑ thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: We'll consider that very challenging question in a minute. Refer you to the constitution in so many ways we already have, but one more question or comment before Michael responds to Joanna's query. Anybody else? Okay. Michael, would you like to respond? Anybody else can also respond as well. Which specific rights are being evoked as we speak of our sustainability in the environment?
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind, and although this isn't necessarily one that, you know, has been framed this way, but it's more about the right to a future.
I just turned 30 this year, and we talked about whether or not we should have a kid or kids, you know, and I think that I know so many people my age or around my age that are currently having this discussion. Is it environmentally sound to have a child now? That to me is something that I don't think any other generation that has ever existed has ever had to consider.
Of course, there were safety considerations, you know, for the longest time. I think to myself, what was it like to, you know, be a woman that was pregnant in 1939 in Western Europe? I mean, that's probably not exactly the easiest time either.
The fact is do we have a human right to our own future, to our own civilization? That's something that I think about way more than I ever wanted to. Of course, there are the human rights, do we have the right to live well, to well‑being, to exist in cities that aren't crowded, that aren't suffocated by dirty air, to drink water that is not contaminated with polluted, with plastic, with industrial waste, et cetera, with human waste? These all fit into the wider concept of sustainable development and whether it's to the growth of humanity or of civilization or whether it's to insuring its well‑being. This is why it's important to talk about this within the context of the Internet and within this community.
The actors and stake holders involved with the internet governance and with internet proliferation, we need to do our part. Obviously, aviation needs to do its part. Private sector needs to do its part, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, what I would say is we have to look at it holistically because although, you know, to be Frank, if anybody is familiar with the carbon futures report, it's essentially a report that came out a few years ago saying that, you know, the majority of all greenhouse gas emissions are coming from about 100 companies. Most of those have to do with either energy production, clearly, agriculture, or with construction, specifically something like cement, which cement mixing, which, you know, emits a lot of greenhouse gases. I'm sorry, everyone.
I get really passionate about this, and I don't mean to lecture because I'm assuming that if anybody is in this room, you know, you know of the problem at hand. I do always have to remind myself to stay, you know, focused on the positives, on the organizations, and the initiatives that are working to do this within our own community.
There's community networking. I don't know how many people here are familiar with community networks. I say over and over again energy access is something that community network deal with from the very beginning. Whenever people are going into remote communities, and we say how do you connect them, they need to set up solar panels because a lot of those individuals don't even necessarily have access to grid power.
Reminding ourselves to stay within this holistic framework with underpinned with the idea that we need to respect human rights, respecting the environment and respecting human rights go hand and hand because we need the environment a lot more than the environment needs us.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank, Michael. Would anybody else from the panel like to also respond to which specific rights are being evoked? Maureen.
>> MAUREEN HILYARD: Well, I would just like to agree. I think Michael expressed a lot of the issues ‑‑ the rights that people have. We should be providing our populations with. I'm looking at it from the Pacific, for example.
On our own we have a population of 14,000. That's sort of less than some of your little suburbs. If you took out all the electricity, if you took out and said that, okay, these guys aren't going to have our internet anymore, they're not going to have access to the internet, I mean, the uproar. This is what happens. This is what is happening in the Pacific. There are people ‑‑ there are a lot of islands that have cable, and there are still people that do not have access. At the same time, you know, like I mentioned the government ‑‑ government sort of priorities.
Sometimes internet is not a priority. Apart from the fact that they use it for everything, that is not an area of investment because they have other interests.
When it comes to, for example, one island, 1,500 people at that particular point in time. Climate change, a cyclone ‑‑ it lost everything. Everything on that island took a long time to deliver services back to normal.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: As Article 4 says, there is a right to develop through the internet and that's the spirit of the sustainable development goals, and that includes property reduction and human development, but also, as we've noted in Article 4B, the internet defined however, mobile phone masks, must be used in a sustainable way. This relates to the disposable of E‑waste and to the use of internet technologies for the protection of the environment.
Would anyone like to continue on this theme?
>> PANELIST: I would like to briefly build on what Michael said, which I find very interesting. The right to the future, and what you said about right to ‑‑ I want to come back to the idea of sustainability that we're seeing on various accounts. I think it's a more holistic framework. It's about the fact that if we are wanting to innovate locally, we want to build small systems. We want to build network economies and sort of outfits that are locally situate and be able to accrue most of the value to the local value change to the population, et cetera. It's not just about reigning in the larger excess that is we see. It's also about creating enabling policy environments that allow start‑ups to do well and that will allow cooperatives to do well and allows the principles of the solidarity economy, the social economy to come forward. It's about the fact that 80% of ‑‑ it's since the 1970s this is a fact that we can see that has been found. Start‑ups don't really thrive or come forward. They just get bought out or sold out or eaten out of competition. That's the more prevalent trend we see. We need to make space for internet rights, and strengthening local worker protects so it's not so awful and so completely out of control. It's about a lot of different things.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Do you have any comments? Okay. Just want to extend the apologies of Megan McDermott. She's, unfortunately, unable to make session. Is anybody here from the technical or government sector, technical community because with the development of smart cities, there is a lot of business to be had, a lot of products to be bought and sold, a lot of techie‑based futures. If anybody would like to excellent on some of these issues from our very ‑‑ give us some concrete specific examples from the floor? That's my challenge. Mainly because the internet isn't just wishy‑washy hardware ideas. It's satellites and tubes and plastics and concrete. It's a very solid material thing these network. We're not just talking about an idea about all being, you know, one world together. Someone had their hand up. Thank you. Please. Speak directly into the mike. Name and affiliation, and thank you very much.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm representing Youth of IGF. I have been in the technical community for the past three years. Currently I'm in the private sector, but I've been involved in academia, and I have been working within the government as well on several projects. My experience in the technical domain of the internet has been specifically in the domain of online social networks. We have been collecting data, publicly available data from different social networks. I've been analyzing activities that people have been doing, different kind of content that people have been sharing. As we all know, different big events have been affected by what people have been talking about right from U.S. presidential elections to Indian prime minister elections to Brexit.
This whole concept of fake content or this spread of different kinds of opinions on the internet have been effecting us. Specifically, I would like to talk about one of the things that we did on Twitter.
There was work ‑‑ everyone would know the concept of how Twitter works. There's this follower and followee terminology that is there on Twitter. We were analyzing how people leverage this account to spread different kinds of fake information.
There is this whole market of this black market which helped people manipulate their follower account to increase their social influence. What people do is I create an account, and I change my picture to one of the most popular celebrities of India. I change my name to one of the most popular celebrities.
For example, if somebody knows a movie celebrity, very famous movie celebrity, we were trying to analyze his account, and somebody else created this fake account with his name, with his picture, and got around 200,000 followers in a week. Then that person changed his name again, changed his picture again, and tried to spread different kinds of content. Because 200,000 people are following that person, everyone gets to see that content. It's very difficult for people to verify that content very quickly unless there is this whole news of getting that content getting and then media in the media checking that fact on ground.
It's very difficult to check the facts very quickly. That news, whatever that account was talking, that news used to get spread to 200,000 followers in just a second. This is just one of the examples that we were studying. We tried to counter this by using some ‑‑ we used some more people are from technical background. We try to detect this behavior using some local detection method to analyze what are the anomalies in the network and so usually the notes will fall in a cluster, but if there's some anomaly, some notes will not be forming or will not be a part of the cluster.
These are the people who have just created the account or just had got some tremendous amount of increasing the followers and very odd amount of time. These are the things that we explore.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. Looking at sustainability online, same thing in terms of the qualitative level.
Thank you, from the floor.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is ‑‑ from Pakistan. I work for the Ministry of IT in Pakistan.
Before that I was associated with a background in electrical engineering. When I was working with the cells that I had in my university, we were working on a smart grid systems in Pakistan, and this is a problem that we have had, having not enough electricity to go around and interrupted power supply.
There's something we work on, and that is low forecasting model. It was based on AI, artificial network, and machine learning. That helped us predict the exact amount of electricity and the production model that we had that is effective to around 99%. That model ‑‑ this was way back in 2014 when I had not, you know, joined the bureaucracy, but since then, I have had the opportunity to work with my colleagues back when we were working.
We have now been using that prediction model to help detect electricity theft in Pakistan. We are using the same model to help find UGF.
There are spots of gas ‑‑ of natural gas that gets lost. There's a whole technicality behind that.
Technically we have been harnessing and trying to, you know, use indigenous small projects and funding that the ministry is giving to projects that we have in organization. Not just helping to come up with ideas. We try to give them a direction and the major theme that we are working on. We want you to come up with something. The results have been wonderful. Harnessing the talent that we have in the University that's been amazing for our government.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. I think in terms of recycling, harnessing small bits of water, I'm sure you have something you would like to say to that. Think about a concrete example.
>> PANELIST: You mentioned the use of AI and algorithm analysis. One of the things we did in our city, we have a system in our city where any citizen can file a complaint or, what do you call it when there's anything in the public. An area that might not be right. A traffic light might not be working, whatever.
They send a message to the city government. Before you had to select certain issue from a dropdown list, et cetera, and this didn't end up with the right person. This information. Now we are using AI to analyze the complaints. You just write your complaint, and AI analyzes it and sends it to the right person. It's really a small thing, but I totally agree that AI can definitely be of huge public use, but this is just ‑‑ we are really making the first steps, right? This is such a simple thing.
This huge unlocked potential, but I also do think that companies have a huge role to play in that because at this point, you know, we have open source, open data projects. For example, we get ‑‑ as a city we get some data on air pollution and traffic. People can use it to monitor and ask critical questions. It's not really a huge social importance at this point.
On the other hand, the things that were mentioned before, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, they have this huge, huge data set which can be used to, like you did, to analyze social, sociological phenomena so we could counter the spread of fake news, hate speech, even terrorism, online spreading of terrorism. We could use that data. The data we get as a public sector is nothing compared to the data that's being gathered by private companies.
>> PANELIST: One of the things I'm doing is to write an ITT strategy. I didn't have one. And one of the important things is that I went to the ISP to find out what the status was, and especially in regards to mobile technology, and found that the islands is probably within the Pacific is one of the top social media users. In fact, it's ‑‑ it was in the top ten ‑‑ within the Asia Pacific Region.
Of a population of 15,000 across the whole of the islands, we had 15,000 mobile plans, and that was 3,000 of them were sort of like prepay. Sorry. Post‑pay. 12,000 were prepaid. It means that, for example, the focus of the ICT strategy is going to be very much focused on mobile use. The fact that we actually hit 100% penetration of, you know, our population was, you know ‑‑ I mean, obviously some of the kids connected into that population demographic don't count, but maybe they do, but we just need to make sure that when we do the strategy, it focuses on using that connectivity that's already there despite the fact that it's fairly expensive, so what's important to them, trying to change their behaviors from perhaps social media to other interests.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much. Social media, mobile phones, the future. Michael.
>> MICHAEL OGHI: I have a couple more things to add, and actually some responses as well.
First of all, you know, it was mentioned about the private sector and collaboration and engagement. Absolutely. I mean, already Facebook, Google, Apple, they're investing in renewable energy for their data centers. That's an importance, but still only one piece of the pie. There are still other considerations to take into effect.
Number two, coming back to the idea of human rights and how it relates to everything. The right to the future. You know, it's something that I remembered a couple of minutes ago that we talk ‑‑ we think about climate change and rising sea levels. Well, first of all, the fact that we have a representative from the Cook Islands here is really something because, you know, rising sea levels and climate change are something that, forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's something you think about every day, and there are already climate refugees from, you know, the South Pacific.
To talk about how it's related, a study came out earlier this year that just looking at the United States alone and within the next 15 years, 1,101 internet nodes, whether it's data centers or delivery networks, et cetera, are at risk of being under water within the next 15 years.
Talking about how it relates to the internet, it's our infrastructure. It's our bread and butter that we're using to connect people currently. It's absolutely relevant, again, and really it comes back to solidarity. How can we talk about human rights and only think about it within ‑‑ it's something that's holistic, and it's something we think about from start to finish. I think emphasizing that aspects of solidarity and then, lastly, something that I was publishing about last year was something I called sustainable access. It's not just about sustainable from the environmental side of things. It's about, okay, how do we get people on the internet? How do we enable Internet connectivity? How do we keep people on the Internet, and how do we enable an environment that is, you know, one that is ‑‑ makes people want to stay online. Just yesterday I saw a Kashmiri activist saying she's giving up Twitter because of the harassment she faces.
You know, people who are not connected, people who are under‑connected, digital media literacy skills are necessary to insure they can participate online. Just imagine if you connected to the internet today for the first time. Just imagine all the information that exists that's misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, et cetera. The fact is these are all connected, and I can't stress that enough. I was trying to tie all these things in together. It's not a one‑off solution.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much, Michael. I think your point is very well taken. We're running out of time. I'm going to ask the panel, and I think the question is, how can we shift the environment? Here I am the mean and built environment, as well as the social environment. If we accept that there is a burden that just the building out, the developing, and the extension of all forms of internet connectivity and use have an environmental burden.
If that's the consensus, then in so many words how can we ‑‑ what are concrete suggestions to take away from this meeting to shift that environmental burden of Internet as a development goal so that it can enhance the natural world we're living in and it can be an enabler of full inclusion to anything that needs a computer of one sort or another? How can we shift that burden and what concrete suggestion does the panel have? It can be a small suggestion, something very concrete. How do we shift to that environmental positive?
>> PANELIST: We talked about this before, and I think you said it right. New digital developments are coming from the private sector, from the public sector, whatever. They need to be socially inclusive and environmentally aware by design. Not have this huge digital explosion, and then regulated afterwards. Right now we're in this process, and we can do it now. That will be it.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Sustainable environmental human rights by design. Thank you. Fantastic. For you.
>> PANELIST: I think we'll start with a smaller suggestion. Some of the points about smart cities, et cetera. I think the key really is I think if we get our global data policy framework right, I think that's a great building block to sort of, like, thinking about how the future of the internet can be reshaped. It’s think it's all about the data. It's about how we, you know, build context appropriate data frameworks for specific states, for specific goals, et cetera, that are bottom‑led, that are local‑led and locally sort of situated.
>> In one sentence, what's your concrete suggestion to shift the burden? One sentence only.
>> I would say our product changes into technology. And keep talking about this.
>> Thank you, Michael. Fantastic. Maureen.
>> PANELIST: Thank you. I agree with everyone. I think that we were very lucky where we are because we're starting from scratch. We can actually make sure hopefully from now that we take into account human rights.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I would like before we finish the session, the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition has a booth this year. We're very excited. It's complete with balloons and our own youth representative at the age of 3. If you go to the middle concourse and go left and look right, please come and join us and chat.
The other thing is please join our mailing list. We have our annual elections. We're looking for committed people that know the charter work, that want to join the steering committee and stand for the steering committee. All that is happening. We have many, many other sessions. We have one on refugees rights, which is continuing what we've been doing on Wednesday morning.
>> There’s a human rights main session tomorrow as well
>> I like to thank the fantastic panel. Thank you for being here, and have a great Internet Governance Forum, and think twice before you start a search because that uses up, like, dozens of kettles of boiling water. Maybe try and temper your own excess while you're here. I know that's crazy, but you might want to think about Lo‑Fi forms of communication. Thank you.