Opening Ceremony/Welcoming Speech, Keynote Opening Session
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REAL TIME TRANSCRIPT: Opening Ceremony/Welcoming Speech,
Keynote Opening Session
Hong Kong IGF
9:45:00-11:00, Thursday 17 June 2010
Hong Kong
DISCLAIMER: Due to the inherent difficulties in capturing a live
speaker’s words, it is possible this realtime transcript may
contain errors and mistranslations. An edited version of the
realtime transcript which amends the inherent errors, will
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contents of this transcript.
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>> : Welcome to the internet news forum. The theme of the
forum is building community, realising possibility.
To hold Asia Pacific is host by APNIC, APTLD,
DotAsia Organisation, Freedom House, Hong Kong Council
of Social Service, The Hong Kong Federation of Youth
Groups, Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Ltd,
the Hong Kong Representative of the Multistakeholder
Advisor Group of the IGF, Internet Professional
Association, Internet Society Hong Kong, NetMission and
the Office of the Honourable Samson Tam, Legislative
Councillor of the information technology functional
constituency.
Today there is simultaneous interpretation into
Mandarin, Cantonese, English available for us today.
Please get the headsets from the counter outside.
You can see the realtime English transcript on the
screen whenever the session is conducted in English.
Besides sign language is available beside the stage.
So now we may start the opening ceremony. I now
invite Mr Stephen Lau, chairman of the organising
committee, to deliver his welcoming speech.
>> Stephen Lau: Thank you, Mr Jeremy Godfrey, distinguished
representatives of our organising committee, sponsors
and supporting organisations, honoured guests, ladies
and gentlemen, good morning.
I believe this is the first time we have an IGF
conference in Hong Kong. IGF stands for Internet
Governance Forum.
I would not want to steal the thunder of my
distinguished colleague, Markus Kummer from the United
Nations, who later on will provide us with an
instruction to this global UN initiative, nor would
I steal the thunder of Mr Jeremy Godfrey, who would talk
about how it came about Hong Kong as organiser and
organising this particular conference.
I just want to devote a minute or so to the word IG,
internet governance.
The word governance, to me and to most people, if
you go to a conference on governance, it sort of has
a perception of fairly complex, in fact a dry subject,
maybe even a boring subject, the word governance.
However, internet and governance together, if I can
just mention that, what it actually means, in fact, what
I would like to have called it is you and internet.
Your future, how it is linked to the future of
internet.
If you look at it from that perspective, you, for
example, when we talk about ourselves, we are either
digital immigrants, meaning that those bone those born
in 50s, 60, 70 who have been exposed to internet mid
career or adulthood or what we call digital natives, the
80s and the 90s, who are I would say to paraphrase
a term, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, when
they have been born with a mobile phone in their hands.
Why? Because I have been teaching her how to look
at photos on this phone.
You, whether you are digital native, whether you are
digital immigrant, I like you to see these two days as
a personal journey. Our life has been enriched by the
internet, enriched in the sense that we have ready
access to information, like Google, you can be involved
as a consumer or as a business operator, you can expand
and interact with your network of friends on the
multimedia purpose through my space, through Facebook,
or you could be reflecting your views on a variety of
subjects through being a blogger, a Twitterer or
participating in chat.
In this conference, which is about you and the
internet, your personal journey whereby you would see
multiple views, multiple perspectives from
multi-stakeholders, whether it is government, whether it
is academic, whether it is civil society, whether it is
business, you will get the views on a variety of factors
like I mentioned already and also some of the negative
implications, on a personal basis, it could be privacy
relation, it could be cyber bullying, it could be access
to information which might be of an active nature and
also nature, sort of macro issues, like cyber attacks,
cyber terrorism or maybe freedom of expression,
vis-a-vis sometimes see you mow maybe all or sort of too
much control by the administration, so it’s a personal
journey, I’m sure you are going to have an exciting two
days journey, when you look at all these perspectives
and then you find your own positioning in your own
belief.
So if it’s a personal journey, not only of
information exposure, it’s a personal journey of self
discovery, about your expectations, about your
deliberations, about your conviction upon how you look
at through the eyes of the internet, your own career,
your life as well.
With that introductory remark, may I ask, may
I invite Mr Jeremy Godfrey, Chief Information Officer in
the HKSAR government, who is also our adviser to the
organising committee as well as the patron, to say a few
words to this mattering.
>> Jeremy Godfrey: Thank you, Stephen, Samson, ladies and
gentlemen, good morning.
Welcome to this event.
Can I first of thank the organising committee and
Stephen around the whole committee, Edmon, Charles,
other people, Samson, who have done a huge amount of
work to create this event.
Thank you very much to you as well.
The origin of this event is that there has been the
UN has been running a conference called the IGF, the
Internet Governance Forum, for four years now, or five
years.
That is quite an interesting event, because it’s not
a kind of normal UN government to government conference.
It really involves all sorts of stakeholders: govs,
members of on in government organisations, people from
the internet industry and so forth.
They all come together to talk about these important
issues. The internet, of course, is very important in
all our lives. We now have globally there are 2 billion
people almost using the internet. In Hong Kong,
80 per cent of households are connected to the internet.
The households with children, it’s up into the
90 per cent.
It’s fundamental to all our lives.
There are many, many issues that affect the
internet. Some of them are kind of technical in nature,
called the management of critical resources they talk
about, things like domain names and IP addresses.
Those can be matters of great controversy and
excitement to people.
There are also issues which are much less technical,
issues like how do we get from 80 per cent to
100 per cent in or at the conference we had an Asian
Pacific round table earlier this ek would, there was
a gentleman from the Bangladesh Parliament here and he
was saying that in Bangladesh, they have about a third,
they have 50 million people, connected to the internet,
out of a population of 150 million and the IMPACT that
that can have on Bangladesh’s development, to get more
people connected to the internet is really quite large.
In Hong Kong, we have announced a campaign or
a programme to try and get the penetration amongst low
income families, which is already pretty high, towards
the high 80 per cent, almost a little bit under
90 per cent, how can we get that even higher? The
reason for wanting to get that higher is in education,
if you’re a teacher and you have a class of 30 or 40
children, if you have three or four or 10 children in
your class who are not connected to the internet, then
as a teacher, you are going to be very reluctant to base
your the way you deliver teaching and learning around
the use of the internet, very reluctant to incorporate
that into teaching and learning because if you do that,
you will be excluding a small number of people in your
class.
That means that the people who suffer are not just
the ones without internet access, the people who suffer
is everybody in the class.
That’s why we are both giving some money to help
people, low income families pay for the cost of internet
access and computers, we are also going to set up an
organisation to get the price down to enable them to buy
access and computers very cost effectively.
There is also issues around wise use of the
internet, how can people can safe on the internet, how
can they protect themselves from threats and how do they
make use of this fantastic resource in a positive way.
Again, we will be working with the Federation of
Youth Groups and other NGOs in Hong Kong with
a significant educational campaign, targeted not just at
children, but also at parents and at teachers about how
to be safe on-line.
There is also, I think there is an emerging issue
session where we talk about web 2 and the way that
people can use the internet to participate in society
more widely. We are beginning to see the government,
for example, making use of Facebook as a means of public
engagement. The most high profile is the Facebook page
that has been set up for the act now campaign, so we
have got the CE making videos and having it posted on
Facebook and his office responding, posting news and
responding to comments there. In rather less high
profile ways, we are seeing other government officials
beginning to use these new tools to enhance public
engagement. Of course, that is a very early stage and
there probably is many mistakes being made as getting it
right, but I think everybody has to live and learn.
Finally, talk about managing critical resources.
Of course, we have been working quite hard to make
sure that the .hk domain is managed in a way that
reflects all the needs of the community. That seems to
be a much calmer organisation now. Of course, it was
one of the first applicants for a domain name in
a non-English script. So the application for .HongKong
was I think submitted on the very first day that was
open for applications and it’s going through the process
now and I think Jonathan, some time next year, we think
they should be available and I think the company has
announced that they are going to — anyone with a .hk
domain can get a .Hong Kong domain on a special buy one,
get one free offer.
These issues about the management of the internet
are very important to all of us. They are important at
a global level, but they are also important at a local
level.
I think one of the most impressive things about the
IGF, which I attended in Egypt in Sharm El Sheikh last
year, was the way in which young people from Egypt were
involved and the efforts that had been made to reach out
to people with disabilities and all sectors of society
to participate.
On the way back, in the airport lounge at the
airport, the schedules from flying from Egypt back to
Hong Kong are not brilliant, a few of us from Hong Kong
and actually from a few other Asian jurisdictions, we
kind of thought, you know, it would be so good to
broaden the participation in internet governance issues
within our own communities.
That was really the genesis of the idea for having
this, is to say that these issues are of importance to
all of us and there are some specific local flavours of
those issues that are worth discussing locally, as well
as what we might also want to any putting to the global
debate.
I think I look at the agenda here. It is a pretty
full agenda. So I have probably spoken too long
already, but I think it will be a really good couple of
days.
Although nobody is going to make any decisions here
today, what I think I hope will happen is that we will
all go away, whether we are from government, from civil
society, from the internet industry, with a better
understanding of the perspectives of the other
stakeholder groups, so that when we do participate in
decision-making forums, we are all able to make better
informed decisions and decisions that reflect a better
understanding of the needs of the entire community.
That’s my wish for today. I’m sure that you will
all fulfil it and I wish everyone a happy conference and
productive conference.
Thank you very much.
>> : We ask Mr Jeremy Godfrey to stay on stage and provide
the thank yous to our sponsor.
First I invite representative from Microsoft, Mr
John Galligan, to come up on stage.
May I now invite the representative from APNIC, Ms
Samantha Dickinson, to come up on stage and receive the
thank you plaque.
May I now invite the representative from Cyberport,
Mr Herman Lam, to come on stage and receive the thank
you plaque.
May I now invite the representative from HKIRC,
Mr Jonathan Shea, to come on stage and receive the thank
you plaque.
May I now invite our community sponsor, the
representative from APTLD, Mr Keith Davidson, to come on
stage.
I would also like to acknowledge IMPACT, one of our
company sponsors for the contribution to the APRIGF.
May I invite the representative from JPRS to come on
stage and receive the thank you plaque, please.
May I now invite the representative from SIRC to
come on stage and receive the thank you plaque, please.
May I now invite Mr Stephen Lau to to present the
thank you plaque to Mr Jeremy Godfrey.
All sponsors will have a group photo now.
May I invite representative from organising
committee to stand in front of podium and take a group
photo with our sponsor, including Samson Tam,
Legislative Council member. Edmon Chung, Mr John Fung,
director of ITRC HKC, Mr Ken Ang, The Hong Kong
Federation of Youth Groups, Mr Alex Ho, Mr Charles Mok,
and Ms Elaine Chang from NetMission.
Thank you to our sponsors.
Please be seated.
This is the and of our opening ceremony.
We shall now start the key note section. May I now
invite Mr Stephen Lau, the session chairman, to start
the session for us.
Thank you. I would like to introduce Mr Markus
Kummer, the executive co-ordinator for the secretariat
of IGF for United Nations. Mr Kummer has
a distinguished career as a diplomat in the Swiss
Foreign Ministry, having held a number of senior
positions across Europe.
Prior to his current position, he was very much
involved in all the pre inter-governmental pre
discussions and working groups with regard to internet
issues which led to the formation of IGF, which is now,
as I said, the executive co-ordinator for the
secretariat.
Mr Kummer is a well-known figure on the global scene
and he will talk, give us some background on IGF, its
origin, its current status and what IGF to the world at
large.
>> Markus Kummer: Good morning, thank you, Stephen, for the
introduction. It is a great pleasure for me to be here.
As you can imagine, you heard that I’m a Swiss
citizen and I found it difficult to find sleep last
night after the exciting victory of Switzerland.
I will try and give some background and context on
the IGF, how it fits in in global discussions, where we
come from and where we are heading for.
To start with, a few words on the internet, as both
speakers before me have pointed out.
The internet creates unprecedented opportunity, but
at the same time, also challenges on a global scale.
The internet has no borders and the world is based
on borders, the world, as we know it, as it is. This
leads to a natural tension between systems.
Whenever we have global problems, there are calls
for global solutions. The UN is normally the place to
find global solutions, such as on climate change.
So there are many who think there should be a global
solution for the internet.
However, governments sometimes can jump to
conclusions and take their own decisions. This has
happened at the national level in some cases where there
has been an outcry within the respective countries that
the decisions taken were not the right ones.
My take on that would be that it’s better to live
with a problem, rather than finding the wrong solution.
Wrong solution on a global scale could actually
stifle the further development, deployment of the
internet.
What matters to users is to have a reliable, stable
tool, is to have no political interference and to have
a stable and predictable regulatory environment.
Having said that, it is obvious that many
governments are not happy with the way the internet is
run. They rely on the internet net by now as a backbone
of global infrastructure and they would like to feel in
charge, as they are normally.
New model of internet governance, others favour
a more evolutionary approach.
There are different views on government involvement,
but it is clear by now that the stronger government
involvement seems inevitable.
One of the confusions with internet governance
related to the actual word “governance”. What does it
mean?
There was a strong resistance when the word first
emerged in the global discussions. There were those who
thought governance was supposed to mean government, but
this is not the case.
Governance is an abstract concept and is not
necessarily limited to government activities.
Looking back now at the history, the term first
emerged back in 2003 during the negotiations on the
first phase of the world summit on Information Society,
when the summit began to talk about the internet.
It was a recognition of the importance of the
internet.
The discussions revealed that there were a clash
between two schools of thought, between two systems, as
I said initially.
On the one hand, the internet community, the private
sector, those who actually run the internet and on the
other hand, many governments.
These are basically two visions of the world that
are not compatible on the one hand, the internet vision
networks, of a collaborative effort, of bottom up
distributed cooperation versus the governmental
corporation, where governments sit on top of the
pyramid, where governments are in charge and the others,
as Jeremy pointed out in his remarks, the others are
sometimes led into the room, but if they are let into
the room, they are told to sit at the back and they
don’t have necessarily the right to speak or they only
have the right to speak when they are given a slot,
usually at the end of the session.
This is what happened during WSIS, governments
finally negotiated the final text, all the others were
locked out of the room.
Between 2003 and 2005, there was a process, there
was an inter-governmental working group on internet —
there was a working group on internet governance set up
by the secretary general to find ways to move forward.
I had the honour to be the secretary of that working
group and the working group made recommendations and to
a large extent, they were endorsed by the summit, the
second phase of the summit, which took place in tu nis
in 2005.
The Tunis agenda was the outcome document of Tunis.
It did not make any major changes. It recognised that
the existing arrangements have worked effectively, but
also noted that there is room for improvement, like any
human endeavour, there is always room for improvement.
In Tunis heads of state and government took a two
pronged decision. On the one hand, they invited the
secretary general of the UN to convene a new forum for
multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, the Internet
Governance Forum, and on the other hand, it recognised
the need for enhanced cooperation to enable governments
on an equal footing to carry out their roles and
responsibilities.
Internet governance was defined by the Tunis agenda.
The Tunis agenda adopted a broad definition of internet
governance that goes beyond naming and addressing the
physical infrastructure of the internet.
It identified a broad range of public policy issues,
part of internet governance and it proposed further
internationalisation of internet governance
arrangements.
Very important aspect was that the recognition of
the various stakeholder groups, of the academic and
technical communities as a new stakeholder group, and it
recognised also the importance of multi-stakeholder
approach at all levels, national, regional, global, and
it recognised the role of the private sector and the
civil society as a driver of innovation in the
development of the internet.
Among the policy issues it identified some
priorities, such as strengthening the trust framework
and security, cyber crime, spam, freedom of information,
consumer protection, data protection, privacy,
multilingualisation of the internet and local content
development.
WSIS also adopted principles. The management of the
internet should be multilateral, transparent and
democratic.
These are all very nice words. Nobody can be
against it.
However, it’s not that clear what they do mean.
Some of them are mutually exclusive, multilateral,
for instance, in a traditional UN language, means
traditional UN setting, where governments deal with each
other in an inter-governmental organisation.
If you have a multi-stakeholder setting, that does
not fit into this traditional setting.
What does it mean, the WSIS principle? Is it
traditional inter-governmental cooperation or is it
bottom-up multi-stakeholder cooperation?
After Tunis, I like this quote. The economist said:
“It is a piece of sort. No one controls the
internet, but many are determined to try.”
As a preliminary synthesis after Tunis, the
discussions are going on, but multi-stakeholder
cooperation has been firmly established now.
The roles of the different stakeholders, it has also
been made clear that they have respective roles, they
don’t all have the same role. They have different
roles.
Governments remain the decision makers. However,
these decisions need to be based on a solid
understanding of the issues. There is a need for
dialogue between private sector, civil society, the
technical community and governments.
Governments need to tell them what they are worried
about and the other stakeholders need to advise
governments on the feasibility and on the consequences
of envisaged solutions.
Now to the IGF more in detail. It has, by now, been
recognised that it’s one of the major outcomes of WSIS
and in so far, it has proved successful. But what is
the IGF? It is sometimes easier to define what it is
not.
It’s not a UN conference. It’s not a new
organisation. It’s not a decision-making body. It has
no defined membership. Anybody with proven expertise
and interest can participate.
In essence, the IGF is a platform to discuss public
policy issues related to the internet.
It provides a space for a structured dialogue on
these issues. It provides a platform for sharing best
practices at all levels.
It provides also a neutral meeting place for all
related institutions, inter-governmental organisations
and the internet institutions.
For those who attended the Asian Pacific regional
meeting we had yesterday, the chairman of the board of
ICANN on the panel, Peter Dengate Thrush, and he said
that he had found a better relationship with the
International Telecommunication Union, a classical
inter-governmental organisation. Thanks to the IGF,
where he could meet on a neutral ground, in that sense,
the IGF provides a non-threatening environment. You
don’t have to go to the other. You can meet in
a neutral ground where everybody goes.
In this sense, the IGF helps build thrust and
confidence among all internet users.
Its methodology is not based on the classical method
of UN meetings, where usually people sit down and
negotiate on a text.
It is based on the exchange of information on the
sharing of best practices, the not to also is: think
globally, act locally.
There is no one size fits all solution that has been
repeatedly recognised that one solution may work in one
environment, but not in another.
They have to be adapted to the needs of each
country, of each region.
The internet is a shared environment, sharing
experiences and best practices seems the methodology for
that environment.
What the IGF does is what I like to call is based on
a soft governance approach.
It is based on the convening power of the UN, when
the UN extends an invitation, people usually go to
attend a meeting.
However, it has no power of redistribution, it only
has the power of recognition. It can identify issues of
concern, it can draw attention to an issue, can put an
issue on the agenda of international cooperation.
One example we discussed also during the past two
days and came up today is the introduction of the
internationalised domain names. The IGF did not take
any decision in this matter, but it is generally
recognised that the IGF helped accelerate this process.
This strange animal the IGF is has led to different
expectations and there remain divergent views on the
strengths and weaknesses.
Some see this lack of decision-making power as
a weakness and they would like the IGF to produce more
concrete results.
Others, on the contrary, see this apparent weakness
as a strength.
This lack of decision-making power creates space for
an open dialogue, where people can discuss without
having to fear unintended consequences.
When you’re in a negotiating context, you don’t
really discuss, you fight, you fight over words.
I vividly recall discussions in the WSIS where we
didn’t go into substance, it was just stating positions.
For instance, there was a big debate on open or
proprietary software, but there was no informed
discussion on the merits of each software.
You can hold views, that this is better or that is
better, but in WSIS, there was no real exchange of views
or opinions. There was, at the end, the adopted text,
which said:
“Open source software is good. Proprietary software
is good.”
But it did not provide any guidance, what is better
for what use.
In the IGF, we had discussions on this issue related
to security.
I’m not saying we drew any conclusions, but at least
we had an informed exchange of views. Some said open
source software is better for security, because you can
control it.
Others made the point no, proprietary software is
better, because you don’t have any use in a big
corporation or in a government, who may not be that
savvy, making big mistakes and both points were valid.
There are pros and cons to each side.
This is basically the IGF approach, that we look at
each issue from all the aspects and the past experience
has shown, there is usually no simple answer to any of
these issues.
Again, to the regional meeting we had two days ago,
the past two days and now more the local meeting, in
WSIS, in the global discussions, there is much talk
about the global issues.
However, there is an increasing recognition that
national and regional policies are important.
As somebody said, good internet governance begins at
home.
The enabling environment for instance, is a key
factor to allow for the development and deployment of
the internet. This is very much a local issue.
Policy cohesion, policy coherence at all levels,
they are two ways of envisaging it. There is a top down
way, a classical way of negotiating a treaty, but there
is also a bottom up way of following, of adopting the
right policy. If every country, if every region, if
every jurisdiction adopts the right policy, then we also
get there and maybe quicker than by trying to find
global solutions.
The national and regional IGF initiatives, they were
not part of the negotiated outcome. WSIS in Tunis
recognised the importance of national and regional
policy coherence, but they did not say much about it.
It did not say how this should be achieved.
It is interesting to see that after the first two
IGF meetings, it began to appear, first in the Latin
American and Caribbean region and in East and West
Africa, in Europe, there is a Commonwealth IGF
initiative, now also Asian Pacific and then there are
many initiatives at the national level, from the United
Kingdom to the US to Italy, Denmark, Spain, the latest
one was in the Russian Federation.
These are basically very spontaneous initiatives,
such as this meeting here, very much in a bottom-up way.
There is no common template. All of them, the only
thing they have in common is that they are based on
a multi-stakeholder approach.
We have had four meetings so far, in Athens 2006,
Rio 2007, Hyderabad India 2008, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt,
in 2009 and now we are preparing the fifth meeting,
which will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 14 to
17 September this year.
We have built our meetings on the same core themes
and priorities since Athens, access and diversity,
security, privacy, openness, critical internet
resources, with development and capacity building as
cross cutting priorities.
What we have improved in Athens, we dealt with each
of the issues separately and in Hyderabad, the third
meeting, we began to group some of the issues that
belonged together. We have grouped them together, such
as security and openness.
Now we cannot imagine any more that you can talk
about security without talking about openness and
privacy and you cannot talk about openness without
talking about security.
These issues are very much interlinked.
In Vilnius, the overall theme for the meeting will
be IGF 2010, developing the future together.
The agenda more in detail is managing critical
internet resources, where we look at the plumbing, the
domain name system, the internet protocol address
allocation.
We have security, openness and privacy. We have
access and diversity. These are the other twin issues.
You can only have access if you respect diversity
and I see with pleasure, that here you provide
facilities for those hard of hearing, we have sign
language.
This is a very important issue, as the internet
provides unprecedented opportunities for people with
disabilities.
We have, for the first time, internet governance for
development and here have to open a parenthesis.
I noticed that there is a great interest here to discuss
what we call, in the jargon, in the WSIS jargon, ICT for
development. That is more issues related to the
development aspect.
Here we try to be narrower in scope and really talk
about internet governance issues, how does it relate to
development, without going into the broader societal
development agenda.
Under the traditional emerging issues heading, we
will look this time at cloud computing and in the
previous years, we always had a taking stock session,
which looked inside at how the IGF worked. This year,
we will take stock of the broad internet governance
landscape to see what has changed since Athens.
Change has been momentous. In Athens, we talked
about, commended ourselves that there was 1 billion
people on-line, but we said what happens to the other
5 billion? By now, we have 2 billion people on-line,
which is a tremendous change and then, of course, all
the other changes that happened at the application end
of the internet.
The original mandate of the IGF was for five years,
subject to review.
The secretary general of the United Nations was
requested to hold formal consultations with IGF
participants on the desirability of a continuation of
the forum. These consultations took place in Sharm El
Sheikh last year.
Based on this, the secretary general recommended to
extend the mandate for another five years.
The decision will be taken by the General Assembly
of the United Nations in December this year.
This is, in a way, the inherent paradox, the IGF was
the result of inter-governmental deliberation,
governments made a very, I would say, courageous
decision in opening the doors to all the stakeholders,
but at the same time, this open forum is not allowed to
decide by itself.
Governments retain the decision-making power and in
the decision-making process, again, the other
stakeholders will be excluded.
However, the other stakeholders are encouraged to
connect with their respective governments to make sure
that their views come across in the final decision.
These final decisions ultimately will also be
a decision on whether or not the multi-stakeholder
approach is the best approach towards internet
governance and also on whether or not to continue with
a soft governance model such as the IGF.
With this, I thank you for your attention. I wish
you excellent deliberations for the next two days.
Thank you.
>> : Thank you, Mr Kummer.
Now may I invite Mr John Galligan, Director of
Internet Policy from Microsoft Asian Pacific, to deliver
his key note speech.
>> Stephen Lau: John, may I , on behalf of the conference,
introduce Mr John Galligan.
John is the regional director for internet policy
for Microsoft. His role is support markets across Asian
Pacific, to promote Microsoft internet policy agenda,
including privacy, security, cloud computing and the
on-line ecosystem.
Apart from having held a number of senior positions
in the private sector, he has also occupied a number of
senior advisory positions in Australian federal
politics.
I’m very impressed with the title of his
presentation, because it denotes the congruence of two
important facets in contemporary internet usage.
One is cloud computing, which provides a new channel
and efficiency and productivity for users and for
business services alike, providers alike.
Secondly, it’s trust.
Without trust, without integrity, whether it be data
or service, then we don’t have the internet will not be
able to be effectively grow.
With the presentation title of Trust and Cloud
Computing, New Opportunities and New Responsibilities,
may I present Mr John Galligan.
>> John Galligan: I’m going to have to definitely
multi-task. I’m meant to point over here, look at my
slides over here and talk over here. I’ll try to do at
least two of those well, so please bear with me if I’m
a little bit shortcoming of one of those.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here and
certainly the opportunity to support what is an
incredible dialogue.
I’m very inspired by what I have seen through my
travels through Asia. In Australia, we like to think of
ourselves as Asia, but now living six months in
Singapore, you realise just how different this part of
the world really is from I suppose the lower part of the
region.
Spending the last week or so here in Hong Kong and
in mainland China, you really feel like you’re at the
engine room of the global economy.
But more importantly, you’re the foundry of much of
the innovation that the rest of the world is going to
enjoy.
When you think about the internet, and in many ways,
what cloud computing is going to create from the
internet, investment that has been done through the
region, I think we are again in an incredible part of
the world, to see the real benefits that come from this.
But I did start my presentation with a title, new
opportunities and new responsibilities, but I thought
also too I would throw in new environment as well,
because I think the technology industry has a tendency
to believe its own press releases, but it tends to not
bring people along with the dialogue very quickly and
starts introducing new terminologies and new ideas,
without really explaining them a little bit.
So I thought I would spend the first couple of
minutes talking a little bit about cloud computing and
maybe doing a bit of level set of what we think of cloud
computing and hopefully they get an understanding from
you as well.
I should say that I had a little more sleep last
night than Markus, because the Australian team, if you
have been following, hasn’t been doing as well as
others, so I’m getting a lot more sleep over the World
Cup over the next couple of days as well. If I look
a bit bright eyed and bushy tailed, it’s because I got
plenty of sleep last night.
In our company, we are talking about the cloud being
the fifth generation of computing. I’m not going to go
into great detail of the steps there.
But I think everyone can understand that we are
probably at that pivot point, where technology is really
going to get the dividends from a lot of the investment,
a lot of the innovation that we have seen over the last,
say, 30 years.
We have moved from the mainframe environment.
Mainframe is still a part of much of the infrastructure
that we enjoy within corporations and government, and
they really are going to run the back ends of the
internet cloud. We have gone from the client server to
the web to SOA and the cloud is delivering against the
expectations that we have all developed over the last 10
or so years around the internet. The opportunity to
really download applications, the opportunity to use our
web enabled devices, in a way which is seamless.
Stephen opened the discussion talking about digital
natives and digital immigrants and there is a generation
who will never know what it’s like not to have a web
enabled device.
As the industry come together to meet that
expectation, it’s very important for us to think about
the responsibilities on us as developers and as industry
participants, but also what is the public policy
environment that is going to ensure that those
expectations are met.
Markus talked about the cohesion issues of public
policy.
We are seeing the cohesion between the opportunity
and the responsibilities very discerningly, so the
opportunity for us to really think about the way in
which we are going to deliver our internet strategy and
services in a way which is meaningful and responsible is
very important to Microsoft, but I also know it’s very
important to participants with the IGF as well.
Again, we are seeing the extension of the platform.
>From the client based PC, that I can see many people
using here in the room today, to the servers which sit
in many ways behind the infrastructure that we take for
granted, through to the mobile devices.
Asia is clearly one of those markets where you are
seeing the up surge in mobile devices really driving the
application and the ecosystem around that, through to
the last thing which is the cloud.
Again, I would like probably to ask the question of
how many people understand the terminology, the cloud,
here.
We have a few.
I suppose I have to ask the question, how many
people have a hotmail address or a gmail address or use
Yahoo mail or Facebook?
Essentially, you are all participants in cloud
computing. Because as my CEO says, what used to be on
a server is now a service. That is essentially probably
the most pithy way we can describe the cloud. It is
essentially using your device, phone, PC, division, the
LG refrigerators are cloud enabled.
So it’s basically using whatever device you choose
to deliver a service that you want, anywhere, any
device, any time.
In some ways, the fact that we are a bit ignorant of
the fact that we are using cloud is not surprising,
because again the technology industry probably hasn’t
been as good as describing exactly what cloud computing
is all about.
We have come a long way. I have been with the
organisation a little over four years and if someone
asked me what cloud computing was to me, it was opening
my laptop in a plane, doing my email between gates,
probably between visits, but now we really do understand
that it is in many ways moving to that descriptive
computing environment that we all take for granted.
Microsoft commissioned a survey earlier this year to
really better understand within the American context
what people understood the cloud services to be.
First of all, 76 per cent had never heard of it.
But 84 per cent of people use some sort of web mail,
so they were stakeholders in the cloud.
57 per cent use social media sites and I think that
probably that is undersells in many ways the social
networking platforms that are out there. I think the
number is a bit soft. 33 per cent of people store their
photos on-line.
I’m sure probably in an IT literate environment like
this, those numbers are going to be higher, certainly in
terms of the use that we are working in storing your
data and storing your memories.
When we ask people and explained what cloud was,
58 per cent of consumers and 86 per cent of businesses
are excited about what they see around cloud computing
and more importantly, they do see the opportunity for
government to really enable services and to deliver
opportunities to citizens in a better way through the
cloud.
We are seeing a driven it both ends, in terms of con
up so errs wanting that access and that information and
their services being delivered seamlessly.
But in this area of os territory and this area where
government is biggest stakeholdr in the economy and
biggest stakeholder in the terms of our lives, they are
wanted governments to use technology better, to deliver
against the services that they take for granted, be it
education, be it healthcare, be it national security or
national safety.
It’s not surprising that we are seeing the data
being looked at in a different way.
We think about data probably being the new currency
of the digital economy.
With that currency comes value.
Value to individuals, maintaining their privacy,
maintaining the integrity of their information, to
criminals and bad actors who potentially want to use
that information, to organisations who are servicing the
global internet economy through advertising or any other
revenue sources, making sure that they are also being
able to use that information value bring to serve as
their businesses as well.
So the challenge for industry and the challenge for
governments and policy makers across the board, is how
do we protect and secure that information, that very
valuable currency at the same time as driving adoption.
This very complex information ecosystem is now
having to co-exist in very different social, regulatory,
economic and geopolitical contexts.
I’m not going to go into specific details, but the
last six months alone have shown just how complex the
management of data, the management of information,
within those contexts, really are. I think we are going
to see the debates go on for some time. In Hong Kong
and this region is certainly, I suppose, in many ways,
at the centre of some of those debates.
The role that the Internet Governance Forum can
really help to drive some clarity around that is very
important, so we look forward to the role of the IGF can
play around that.
We also have the challenge that many of the policies
and regulations that are governing the internet,
governing the cloud, were built for a complete I’ll
different computing environment. In many ways, they
were designed before even computers and technology were
so pervasive. We have digital issues operating in an
analog policy environment.
Because the internet is really enabled the flow of
information to be less linear, to be less from A to B,
to be more atomic, to be more augmented, more disbursed,
changed and facilitated in a different way, we are
seeing that policymakers are going to be challenged at
how to deal with their local responsibilities in an
increasingly global flow of information and that
information isn’t just flowing from one country to
another or from one stakeholder to another. It is
multiple stakeholders within that delivery of that
information pathway.
For policymakers, and for also for consumers, we
need to think about what does local mean today, for
instance, where the the customer located, where is the
data stored? Who owns it and who can get access to it?
We are seeing complex discussions within government,
we are seeing complex discussions within industry,
across all these pillars.
Who has law enforcement has opportunities and also,
too obligations to protect I suppose the national
security of a country.
But also what is the responsibility of a data hoster
to make sure that data is protected and maintained in
a way which is integral to the service they are
providing to an individual.
We are challenged too about what local means for us,
what are our local responsibilities to law enforcement
or to governments in one market where we may host data,
there I to the customer maybe who may be sitting
somewhere else and terms and conditions didn’t expect us
or any other provider to be so liberal to the access to
that information.
In summary, governments really need to balance
opportunities and responsibility. We are not saying to
put a moat around the cloud, if that’s possible, to box
it in, to think about security and privacy to such
a point where it stops the innovation, it stops the
velocity that we are enjoying through the development of
this new technology.
But equally, too, that there is an amazing level of
responsibility that comes, both with technology to
industry, but also to the governments, to make sure that
we are enabling the opportunities that are so evident
from the delivery of services by the internet and the
cloud, but also to make sure that we are doing so
responsibly.
Some of the core policy issues that we are seeing
manifest itself around the cloud, around the internet,
are nothing new, but again they are magnified by that
incredibly complex ecosystem of information that we are
talking about.
The first one is infrastructure and access. I’m
going to come into these in a little more detail in
a moment.
That is making sure that people get access to the
cloud and access to the internet and on Tuesday, there
was a digital inclusion workshop that talked about
obviously a lot of the issues that come to what does the
digital divide mean to people who don’t have access to
technology.
Increasingly, the digital divide is going to be
those who have access to broadband and high-speed access
to the internet security and cyber crime, Markus
mentioned quite clearly that those are going to be
increasing issues for policymakers and IGF in terms that
we govern the risks around cyber crime and security.
Privacy is a common partner, almost inextricably
linked to security these days.
Because people’s heightened sense of what privacy
means to them is becoming more and more manifest, as the
issues start to play out themselves in the media, and in
the technology environment.
We just have to see some of the social networking
sights around the world these days who are challenged by
the opportunities to build a business environment for
themselves, but also to potentially protect the privacy
of their users. That issue is going to occur for quite
some time.
We are seeing traditional issues, like intellectual
property protection. If information is put up on the
web, on the cloud, how can it be maintained, how can the
integrity of that innovation and that intellectual
property be maintained? Accessibility, not just in
accessibility to technology, but how you can use
technology in a way which is meaningful to people who
have assisted technology needs. The disabled, the
infirmed, seniors, for instance, as services by
government, as services by corporations become
increasingly web enabled, we don’t want to see a divide
created by people who can’t use services because they
are web enabled now and don’t respect the department
needs of people within the community.
Finally, in this part of the world, again, free
expression.
I’m not going to go into terribly great detail.
I think it has been well covered by media and other
groups and I think it is going to be a continuing issue
of context, but what is free expression in the cloud and
how can we maintain the rights of individuals to express
themselves, but also through the national sovereignties
and the national privates of governments to make sure
that they manage their countries and their economies in
a way which is appropriate.
They are the challenges on the policy end.
But the benefits are so manifest and so clear that
hopefully we can have a co-dialogue with those issues
that are of concern, those issues of benefit.
We take healthcare, education, public safety, even
issues of finance and banking, as some of the core
opportunities that we see through the delivery of the
cloud.
Some are more advanced than others. Banking and
finance is probably an area where most people these days
are using the cloud in terms of their financial services
arrangements and public safety we are seeing
increasingly again. The use of the a cloud for
governments to maintain everything from pandemics
through to issues such as warnings around tsunamis and
the other natural disasters.
In education, we are seeing a generation of students
who are going to learn on line and how do we make sure
that we continue the opportunities for that, not just in
those countries that are well advanced in terms of their
digital pedagogy, but also in terms of countries where
the opportunities for education are so incredibly
evident, that we make sure that digital divide isn’t
between those rich countries that are enable their
students there I the cloud, but those who can’t.
Finally, healthcare is obviously been an issue
across countries around the world for a long time and
the US most recently has embraced the discussion quite
vigorously.
In way in which technology can really advance the
healthcare agenda is quite profound. There are issues
of privacy, there are issues of accessibility, which
will come into play.
But we think that the benefits are clearly there and
the opportunities for us to have a dialogue around how
we maintain that responsibility and the opportunity are
really going to be around those four key areas,
particularly for government.
So you talk about interoperability in terms of this
policy environment, as the cohesion that Markus talked
about.
If data is becoming stateless, as it crosses
platforms, as it crosses providers, as it crosses
borders, it is no longer respecting the traditional way
in which goods and services gets transacted.
Increasing control of that information also means
that we need clarity, is also pretty profound. For
developers of applications, they need to know that they
can develop applications that are going to be
universally beneficial and their intellectual property
be maintained. For customers and citizens and
consumers, you need to know that your data that you
provide to a cloud provider is going to be maintained,
that your information, your identify and your
independent is going to be respected.
Finally, for service providers like Microsoft who
are building the backbone or building the infrastructure
for the cloud, we need to have certainty that where we
built our platform, where we put our investments is
going to be sustainable, not only from an economic
perspective or a policy perspective, but even from an
environmental perspective as well.
Public policy needs to be working in tandem with the
technology innovation. Before I came in here, I was
having a conversation with a journalist from Computer
World and she asked what is the rule of a CIO in the
role of public policy these days. Pleasingly, CIOs have
been very involved in the public policy for some time
and they are going to be increasingly involved in how we
devise solutions to these very complex problems.
But equally too policymakers, I said, are going to
have to become more technologically literate because
issues are co-existing so discerningly that no
policymaker can think about privacy without thinking
about the cloud.
Policymakers can think about national security
without understanding the cloud and the internet.
So there is that responsibility on policymakers on
both sides to ensure that they are well aversed in the
technology opportunities and for those technologists to
be well aware that policy does matter and that issues
are going to be decided over a longer time that
potentially the innovation pipeline.
How do we future proof our policy arrangements to
make sure that the cloud is enabled in a way which meets
everyone’s expectations.
And how the legal and regulatory frameworks will
inter-operate will be critical. How a legislator in one
country thinks about the impact of their laws with
respect to laws in another country.
How a law enforcement official thinks about serving
a subpoena on a particular customer and the data is
served off shore. We need to make sure that as we move
towards this very cloud enabled environment, that
everyone from law enforcement agencies right through to
judges and other people who are enforcing the laws
understand the complex arrangements that are in place.
I want to move to three core areas. The first one
is access, the second one is around trust and the third
one is the ecosystem as I mentioned before, the
opportunities for us to build economic and social
benefits through the cloud.
The first one is about access. I spoke before about
the incredible opportunities that Asia has in terms of
broadband deployment. In fact, earlier this week the
Wall Street Journal announced a study from a Tokyo based
organisation which lists the top four markets in terms
of fibre to the home being here in Asia, Hong Kong is
one, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
You can see that Asia really is in the box seat in
terms of the deployment of broadband.
Across the region, not just in those sort of
advanced markets, we are seeing more than US$45 billion
being deployed in the delivery of broadband access, from
countries as diverse as Australia and New Zealand, to
Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
So we are seeing that broadband is seen to be an
incredible investment for governments and also they are
not seeing it just as a stimulus measure, they are
seeing the opportunities to build the pipes and towers
and to build the connectivity for social and economic
dividends in the long term.
There are various delivery mechanisms and I’m not
going to go into those here, because I’m sure everyone
is well aware of the opportunities that different
deployment modes have for broadband.
But those different deployment methods are also
driven by the consumer expectations of how they are
going to deliver their services, be it on a phone, be it
on a PC, be it on notebooks or E-readers now, so you are
seeing the consumer driving in many ways the deployment
of the broadband access. We are seeing a two sided
market as a result on the demand side, customers are
driving the uptake and driving the appetite for
broadband. On the supply side, we are seeing developers
trying to meet that expectation consistently.
Pleasingly, we are seeing again a co-existence of
interests, but without broadband, it is going to be
a fairly sort of short journey, because we need that
connectivity to be universal, we need it to be
affordable and we need it to be reliable if we are going
to ensure that the cloud meets its potential.
In terms of the benefits, I mentioned before about
the huge endowment that is being created here in Asia.
But some studies in terms of what it means for
national economies is pretty exciting.
A company study recently indicated that
a 10 per cent increase in broadband can deliver a 1.5
increase in labour productivity and more importantly,
those top tier broadband access countries enjoy
a 2 per cent higher GDP dividend than those in the
bottom tier. Again, pleasingly, we are seeing many
countries in Asia being at the top end of the broadband
tier, but we are also in a diverse region, where Asia
Pacific is also to many countries at the bottom end of
that tier.
How do we make sure that we don’t have again the
divide between those who have access and those who
don’t?
We are going to talk about the opportunities in
particularly one country and that’s Indonesia.
Again, the lower tier of broadband access, only
13 per cent of people in Indonesia have access to what
we call broadband.
But there are more than 30 million mobile
subscribers in that marketplace and that’s the third
highest in the world.
But it is one of the largest countries in the world,
fourth largest country in the world, 240 million people,
but across 17,000 islands.
Fibre to the home or fibre to the village is
probably not going to be a realistic expectation in
Indonesia, so it is going to be across a different array
of deployment means.
Potentially, how do you look at the 30 per cent of
Indonesia to have a mobile phone and think about maybe
that being the cloud enabled device. It mightn’t
necessarily be Facebook or a social networking site or
search, you might be around something more fundamental.
It might be somebody around microbanking, it might be
around healthcare. In that part of the world,
particularly national safety, giving people early
warnings around earthquakes or tsunamis in a way which
is sensitive and meaningful to that environment.
Also we are thinking about how do you create anchor
institutions through broadband this that marketplace.
Universities, health providers, schools, libraries,
how can they be the nodes for high spread broadband that
the citizens can get benefit from by accessing that
endowment by Indonesia early.
The opportunity for Indonesia is incredibly
profound.
It’s challenging, because of the geography. It is
challenging because of the social and economic
infrastructure.
But think about the opportunities for the fourth
largest country in the world to leapfrog some of the
technology investments to really create an opportunity
for its economy and for its people.
The second area I want to talk about is confidence
in the cloud and I want to make sure I’m not going to go
over time.
Because with access comes responsibility.
That’s either for individuals or for organisations
or government.
The test for us is how we work together to ensure
that we are building confidence in the cloud.
Microsoft has a programme or I suppose it’s really
a philosophy that runs through the company and it’s
called our trustworthy computing experience, because we
have had the experience where we haven’t been the
trusted mol el for delivery of services or delivery of
safe and secure technology experiences.
We have learned hard and we changed our entire
product development cycle with that trustworthy
computing experience at its very heart.
We think that that label, that expression, how you
want to re-cast it, is very important right across the
technology ecosystem, because without trust, people
won’t use the services and without those services,
people won’t get the benefit.
The technology is not just a vector for the security
and risks, it can also be a solution.
We are thinking quite clearly at how cloud can be
a safe and security platform for people to have
confidence in, but at the same time we are very aware
that as you create that honey pot, as you create data in
one spot, that it also will be very attractive port for
criminals and bad actors to try to get access.
In some parts of the world, again this part of the
world particularly, a lot of customers are concerned
about what government access to that information is. We
need transparency from governments about what their
motivations and their laws are going to be with respect
to access to information.
That’s not unique to Asia. The US is also a very
problematic place where customers are seeing access to
data. The Patriot Act and other legislative instruments
are causing concerns for governments and large
companies, any organisation that may host in the United
States or maybe a US based provider.
There are transparencies in the way the US is
managing its access to data. In some ways, that is
showing an opportunity for Asian countries and in Europe
to have detailed and quite clear understanding of what
the terms of governments role in accessing data for
national security and other goals as well.
We say that there are three key elements for
ensuring that we get confidence in the cloud and that’s
a strong deterrence and enforcement and that’s obviously
a responsibility for the development of the software,
but also to the enforcement at the law enforcement end.
Legal frameworks encourage information sharing across
law enforcement officials and police agencies and again,
that collaboration that is so important to making sure
that this global network of environment, that global
network of information, that things are shared in
realtime and that those collaborations are clearly made
early on.
Security will be a major challenge for not only
governments and for service providers, but we also need
to educate consumers and customers about what their role
is to be safe and secure citizens in the cloud enabled
environment. What are their responsibilities as well.
They need to make sure that they understand what the
risks are in moving information on-line.
But also to what they can do to protect themselves,
protect I suppose their PC and their devices and protect
their integrity and their independence and identity.
I said before that privacy is a very close cousin,
almost a co-writer with security.
Because security is about deterring attacks, but
privacy in many ways is a very organic concept.
In the European idea of privacy is very different
than what concept of privacy here is in Asian Pacific.
But as the cloud and as the internet has shown, that
privacy can be a very contentious issue, very quickly
across multiple jurisdictions all at once.
We are seeing the data that’s collected for
legitimate reasons can easily be used inadvertently
often times for illegitimate reasons.
And that illegitimate reasons may just be a personal
view on what they believe to be a privacy breach. It
might necessarily be illegal, but it might in I I’ll not
sit with their own personal values or their personal
expectations of that.
We are engaging in a dialogue and most of the
industry is engaging in realtime dialogues as to what
those tradeoffs are, how do we ensure that we don’t step
over people’s understanding of what the expectations of
privacy are, but at the same time, understand that the
services they can deliver often times for free, will
require a certain privacy tradeoff.
How many people in the room are Facebook subscribers
or Facebook users?
I suppose again hands up here who reads the privacy
policies very carefully on Facebook?
Those privacy policies can be sometimes three
screens long.
That may be very detailed and very appropriate, but
we’re also working within the industry to have some
simple privacy policies, little boilerplates that people
can understand, who are the core principles they need to
understand. But there will probably always be those
three screens of privacy policy, because they do need to
be there to protect the innocent and guilty.
But increasingly, it’s ensuring that there is
a dialogue between consumers and those service providers
about what privacy really means.
We are also seeing that privacy can be a bit of
a trade barrier between that flow of information.
The EU probably is a gold standard in the eyes of
many privacy advocates around how data is managed.
In other parts of the world, where I live in
Singapore, there isn’t a national privacy law.
Information of a certain nature cannot lead the
European Union to come to Singapore. Singapore has the
aspiration to be the data centre for Asia. It wants to
be net importer of information, it wants to use that
incredible endowment around technology to really be an
economic enabler.
I think Hong Kong probably shares many ways those
aspirations as well.
But Singapore without a national privacy law is
basically going to ringfence itself from many of the
other jurisdictions around the world. We don’t believe
we are going to be able to change the European Union’s
view on privacy, but we might be able to change the view
of Singapore’s government of the understanding that
privacy is going to be a tariff barrier in a very free
world of information.
So you are making sure that we have a discussion
around the privacy patchwork and where are the seams
going to be the and where the common patches are going
to be.
We are not going to see one national privacy or
international privacy law around the world. The US
doesn’t even have a national privacy law, so we are not
going to expect to see it across international borders
as well.
But we need to see where the harmonisation of those
laws and the understanding of that patchwork maybe sort
of unpick some seams and make sure just be aware of
where there is going to be some tension and where some
barriers are going to be in that free flow of
information.
Last I’ll, I want to about the fostering of the
ecosystem around the cloud.
Just thinking about the national competitiveness,
that is thinking about the opportunities for developers,
that is thinking about the opportunity for even small to
medium enterprises to really leverage the cloud
infrastructure.
In economist terms, cloud is known as a general
purpose technology, it almost supersedes many other
technologies, in terms of its benefit, it terms of its
dividends it is going to provide. It can lower barriers
of entry, it reduces costs, for instance, you don’t
necessarily have to build your own data you can move to
an operation model and allows flexibility. It’s
elastic, it can move with you, if you have to buy nor
storage, if you have the buy more capacity, you can buy
the same way you are buying electricity.
But how do we also enable this opportunity through
these incredible sort of benefits there I the cloud.
For sectors such as the SME sector. Microsoft
recently commissioned a survey to look at globally what
small and medium enterprises think about the cloud.
Again, it’s very pleasing to see that Asia is ahead
of the curve.
30 per cent of SMEs here in Asia are using the cloud
versus a global average of 261 per cent. What we are
seeing is that 52 per cent saw the benefits in the cloud
versus an average of 46 per cent.
What does this mean for a country within the Asian
Pacific region? Let’s take Malaysia for example.
Malaysia is a market where 99 per cent of businesses
in that environment are small to medium enterprises,
representing about 47 per cent of GDP and 65 per cent of
the workforce. Low ICT penetration but a very high
broadband expectation. The Malaysian government is
working very hard to meet their objectives of 2012 in
terms of broadband deployment, but the government does
have a plan.
So the broadband will be delivered, but if SMEs
aren’t using that back haul, aren’t using that
investment, then we are not going to the benefits to
such a dramatic part of the economy.
The opportunities for us to drive the deployment of
the cloud services to the SME is very important and
that’s really going to require education on how to use
technology and how to become digital citizens.
But it’s also going to require governments to think
carefully about how they are going to inspire and
encourage citizens and enterprises to adopt technology,
be it the physical technology like a PC, right through
to being able to give affordable broadband as well.
We are also seeing that the opportunities to deliver
the services in that country like Malaysia around
healthcare and education are also incredibly exciting
and we hope given such a strong part of the community
such as this SME sector, maybe in some ways the first
move in terms of the opportunities around broadband,
that then consider second dividend be around the areas
of education and healthcare.
I’m going to conclude by talking just a little bit
about what we think the role for Asia will be in terms
of that common market, that regional complexion for the
information flow.
If the 20th century really was, the latter part of
the 20th century was really the engineer of economic
development around the trade of goods and services, we
think the 21st century really should be looking to
include data in that same narrative, this that same
dialogue.
How people can look at the common market for data
within their trade and economic integration discussions.
Again, Asia is probably again at the leading edge of
a lot of these discussions. We have pan regional forums
like ASEAN or APEC or even the transpacific partnership
which is a more discrete set of Asian Pacific
stakeholders.
But if there’s one thing that I suppose gels and is
cohesive across Asia, it is trade and closer economic
integration. We are not going to see a European Union
emerge. We are not going to see a federation like
a United States emerge, what we will see is
a co-existence of interests and how do we think about
the trade in data being as important as the trade in any
other physical commodity.
But without an understanding of what is a foreign
exchange mechanism for that data, it is going to be
rather limited discussion.
It took 80 years for there to be a common for
exchange currency, so we are not expecting this thing to
happen overnight, but we do expect those well advanced
and the muscle that has been developed around trade
discussions to be used in the same discussions around
the trade information and the trade of any other
physical good as well.
Let me give you an example of what we need of that.
I’ll use Singapore because I live there and it has been
a real current discussion.
If Singapore again wants to be this data centre for
Asia, not even Asia, wants to be a global data centre,
and it wants to import information, we understand that
there are issues with sending information from Europe to
Singapore and so there is a non-trade tariff barrier
there.
But equally, how does the Singapore government treat
information that might be sitting in a data centre
that’s the information that is not local, it’s not
indigenous, it just comes from a foreign source, it is
hosted there and going to be sent off somewhere else.
We are talking about potentially free trade zones within
countries for data. Almost bonded warehouses for
information.
It’s a concept that we are floating out there
because we have no other brilliant way of describing it.
Potentially, if information is going to be treated in
the same way as any other good in a free port, it’s not
going to find its way into the marketplace. It is
simply being stored there and going to be accessed from
there from some other information stakeholder, then why
should the Singapore government have any interest in
what resides there.
But we are seeing concerns from customers around the
world for information in our data centre in Singapore,
be it issues of free expression, be it issues of
censorship, but the Singapore government has told us
quite clearly we are not interested in those issues,
because they are not domestic.
But until Singapore government properly evangelises
those comments to the global environment, it’s going to
be hard for stakeholders in Australia or where else to
understand that my data will be protected, that my
identity and my privacy will be protected from the laws
that might be indistinction from Singapore citizen in
that same marketplace.
Again, complex issues, really exciting issues at the
same time, but why not.
Again, the Asia the trade forums. My colleague
Stefan who is from Brussels talks about the fact that if
Europe came together 50 years ago around coal and steel,
potentially Asia can come together around trade and
data. This is the foundry of innovation. This is the
engine room for economic evenerjy around the world.
Again, the incredible innovation we are seeing
within the ITC community in Asia really compels
governments around this region, that comes physical
goods as well.
We think that cloud can be that incredible leveller
of dialogue as well.
Technology has been a leveller of opportunity and
independent for so many and we see the opportunities for
Asia being profound.
There are countries which have had incredible
endowment in terms of the technology investments. We
also see some large gaps in other markets across the
region, in terms of where the opportunity does need to
be incubated.
But we think that using the regional forums
bilateral trade agreements, regional forums, even global
trade treaties can provide an opportunity for those
countries which are at the lower ends of the spectrum to
be helped in terms of their innovation and in terms of
access and infrastructure.
Again, the public policy environment doesn’t need to
be treated as whole. You could do it by sector, by
policy initiative, privacy or security or as country
like Singapore which is thinking about the whole nation
ICT cloud economic development policy.
There is no better time than right now for Asia to
seize the opportunities.
Again, while other parts of the world are thinking
about austerity measures, I don’t think the word
austerity is mentioned in the certainly not when I was
in Shanghai on the weekend. It’s just an incredible
buses to be in this part of the world, where there is
such a dynamic and such an exciting environment against
which to set the compass for a technology edge abled
society and technology enabled economy.
With that, I’ll leave it and thank you for the
opportunity. If I have gone over time, I apologise.
I get very excited about this.
I have the opportunity to probably be around for the
res of the day if anyone wants to ask questions, but
I really thank you for your time.
Thank you for your time.
I really hope that the next IGF I get an opportunity
to show you some of the advantages that we have done as
well.
Thank you.
>> : Thank you, Mr Galligan.
Today open WiFi is available to all of you. Power
sockets are on the floor in case you need to charge your
laptop. Tonight’s conference dinner will be served at
Cyberport here. Participants must get a ticket to
enter. If you have registered but do not have a ticket,
please go to the registration desk to ask for one.
Besides, each registered participant will have
invitation free of charge. Please collect it near the
registration table.
The number of each size of T-shirts is limited and
it is given out on first come, first serve basis.
As a reminder for our moderator panellist speakers,
we will have a VIP room today. Coffee and tea is served
and where you can have the off line discussion there.
If you go through that door, it is the first room
along the corridor.
Now we will have the coffee break. Tea and coffee
will be served on my left-hand side, outside the room.
We will be back at 11.45.