IGF 2023 Policy Network on Meaningful Access: Meaningful access to include and connect

The session started with a video message from Vint Cerf (Chair of the IGF Leadership Panel) in which he replied to the following questions:

• Video Question 1: What is the importance of affordable devices for meaningful access?
• Video Question 2: How can AI contribute to meaningful access?

As mentioned by Vint last year, affordability is a key element to ensure meaningful access: “If you can't afford the devices, equipment and services it gives you access to a meaningful and useful internet, then you don't get to use it,” said Cerf in his speech. “So we need to drive costs out about in a number of ways, it could be making things less expensive. It could be subsidizing income”.

Onica Makwakwa (Global Digital Inclusion Partnership) followed this train of thought and explained about how GDIP defines meaningful access – as a combination of affordable smart devices, daily Internet access and unlimited data. Research has shown that meaningful access needs to be implemented for services that change people’s lives (e.g., looking for a job, government services), going beyond the ordinary use of the network. Hence, we need to recalibrate how to define data and how to employ meaning to it. Replying to an intervention from the floor, Onica highlighted that people in Africa spend as much as 40% of their income on devices or data; hence the importance of providing affordability as a key element to meaningful access.

Moving on with the discussion, Prof. Keisuke Kamimura (Daito Bunka University) explained how Internet use and digital inclusion work in a country such as Japan, which uses non-Latin characters. According to him, ordinary users are fine with the lack of Japanese characters online because of the country’s overall technical capacity with computers and other devices – meaning the digital literacy is high.

Steven Matainaho (Government of Papua New Guinea) introduced the audience to Papua New Guinea’s digital strategy. The island nation holds 12% of all world’s languages, with 846 of them being actively spoken. Connectivity has been a priority for the government since 2003, at a time when the most three accessed websites in the country were PNG News, National Rugby League from Australia, and Facebook. This scenario was consistent for at least ten years, until the digital transformation policy was implemented in 2009. For the government of PNG, meaningful connectivity means connectivity with purpose, and so they started to position themselves as leaders in offering meaningful digital services. Currently, 76% of the population has internet access, varying from 2G to 4G – the country has opted to go straight into mobile access, hence access on landlines is uncommon. There, the threshold for determining device affordability is USD 60 and the government is currently planning tax reduction incentives for devices as part of the next phase of the digital transformation policy (2023-2025).

In the first intervention round, Maria de Brasdefer (International Federal of Library Associations) spoke about the importance of adapting meaningful access to local needs. She also mentioned the key role libraries perform both as spaces that provide public access to the Internet, as well as online versions of offline knowledge. Don Means, the creator of the Gigabit Libraries, was in the audience and introduced the project from the floor: “the Gigabit Libraries Network” – explained Means – “is an open consortium of innovative libraries using emerging telecom technology to expand internet inclusion as well as to increase community resilience against disasters and outages. The Consortium has started deploying low earth orbit satellite kits in libraries in Africa, starting in Nigeria. The aim is that every community should have at least a single point of no fee or low fee internet access like a library, and it should be resilient against outages”.

Martin Shaaper from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) informed the participants that his organization not only promotes best practices and policies to implement the meaningful access across the least developed countries (LDC), but has also, for the past two years, supported this action through the collection of data related to it. In close cooperation with the UN Tech Envoy, a specific set of data to measure meaningful access has been identified and is now regularly collected throughout the regions that are left behind. This set of data is publicly available on the ITU website and is provided to all interested policymakers, in order to support their decision-making process. With a special contribution from the EU and with other international organizations, a pilot project is now being developed in the Pacific region. Data on access collected by ITU is complemented by UNESCO – through the ROAM indicators – with other more qualitative data on the language used and the local contents that are available over the Internet.

Laurent Ferrali from the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) explained that the Digital Africa project, launched last year at the IGF in Addis Abeba, is progressing. In association with eleven partners, seven projects to develop full connectivity are expanding. Priority is given to the empowerment of African CCTLDs and to the development of naming capacity across the continent.

Paolo Lanteri (World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO) stressed that meaningful access policies need to be developed together with content protection and open access measures. WIPO initiatives towards Digital Inclusion include public-private partnerships towards a global book service (“ABC Global Book Service”) that offers open access to more than 80,000 titles in 80 different languages. Good practices must be encouraged and exchanged amongst stakeholders.

Due to connectivity issues, Meme Kagga and Nana Kagga Macpherson (Savannah Moon) could not join the plenary remotely. Bertrand Moullier (International Federation of Film Producers' Associations) spoke from the floor on their behalf, highlighting the social and technical challenges for production of local content in Africa. In particular, he explained that Savannah Moon has produced two highly professional movies on stories closely related to the current situation in their home country Uganda. These movies are now being distributed directly by the two entrepreneurial ladies over the Internet through mobile streaming services, with all the limitations that this form of distribution has. No specific policy currently exists in Uganda to support the production of local content.

In addition to the interventions from Don Means and Bertrand Moullier, we welcomed the following remarks:

- Kossi Amenou raised the question of who collects, who stores and who controls data about African Internet users, because this is a delicate question for the continent.

- TB Dinesh, Servelots India, stressed the importance of projects as the one he is running in India (featured in the 2022 PNMA Output Report, with progress updates connected to this year’s final report), that takes into account one limitation of the Internet today: most of the information is in written form, which creates a barrier for illiterate persons and indigenous cultures that are based on oral tradition and communication.

- Maarten Botterman, ICANN, remembered the importance of the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) that finally allow countries and communities using non-Latin alphabet characters to access the Internet in their own language. These efforts have been relevant, but still more need to be done in order to increase the usage of IDNs.

- Carlos Afonso, NUPEF (remote), stressed the importance of “persistent connectivity,” as an additional problem for those communities that are cut out from progress towards access and have unstable connection. This is one of the handicaps that limits a larger use of the Internet by those that are working from home.