The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> SHANNON TEWS: Good morning, everybody, thank you for joining our panel. This is a 10‑year ‑‑ this discussion we had 10 years ago in IGF in Bali in 2013, and can we're ‑‑ I'm excited to have it today, because there's so much that has happened and a lot of it we didn't predict, yet the internet was happy to take on all the new excitement of the next 10 years that we have from 2013‑2023, and we're going to discuss how we're going to manage it going forward.
The key questions we're going to discuss today are where were we 10 years ago, where are we now, and where are we headed, and how is the forward planning that brought us into the healthy vibrant ecosystem that we are currently enjoying going to bring us forward on this?
So today on my panel I have next to me, Glenn Deen, an engineer at Comcast NBCUniversal. Paolo, who is the world intellectual property organisation, Konstantionos, who is with ‑‑ at the Atlantic society and was a senior director at the Internet Society and Geoff Huston is with the chief scientist at APNIC, who should be online joining us. And then eventually we're going to come over to Stella, who is studying governance and policy and is with NetMission.Asia.
Thank you for joining us.
Let's start off, Glen, we're going to start with you. What have we learned in the past 10 years and what do you think are the dominant issues that really helped the internet and the network infrastructure grow in that 10 years?
>> GLENN DEEN: Thanks, Jane.
That's an interesting question. 10 years ago when we did the panel, it was really early days in terms of internet video. We had some streaming services were popping up, we had sort of the initial for ray into scaling the internet to handle content with millions of viewers instead of thousands of viewers. And I think looking back, we met those challenges pretty effectively. Despite dressing up today, trying to blend in the adults here at the IGF, I am an internet engineer, and from an engineering perspective, we had a lot of challenges back then. Video takes a lot of data. Video is a lot of data. As you add more video, you have even more video, as you add more videos, you add more watchers, and that's even more data.
We scaled the networks very effectively to the point where we don't really ask the question, can I do video over the internet anymore. We don't ask the question, can we do video easily between us? I can now walk down the street here in Kyoto and live stream back to my family in Los Angeles. That's remarkable that I can do that over the internet. And I don't have to ask anybody's permission, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops, I don't even need a crew, I just use my phone. That's remarkable.
Looking back from where we were at 10 years ago to today, it's a success story from an engineering standpoint. That's my area. We've succeeded. We're not done, there's new stuff ahead, one of the big changes we're going to be talking about, I'll talk about this later, is we've done a very great job at Video‑on‑Demand, which is typically prerecorded movies and television shows for professional standpoint. And the next frontier is live stuff. Live sporting events, live broadcasting your child's soccer game to your grandparents, who are at home and maybe another state or another country. And bringing live to the experience of streaming and video on the internet. We'll talk more about that in a few minutes.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Great. Paolo, you have been working in this space for quite some time, and there was a lot of concern about how IP rights were going get managed back then. It seems like you have done a very efficient, effective job of getting the collaboration of a lot of people who didn't want to get along 10 years ago. So talk about your success.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I rarely start with an apology, but it's ‑‑ given the context I must do that. On top of being an international civilian, I'm an IP lawyer, so I try to keep myself understanding and I'm heavily jet lagged, and it's 8:45 in Japan. So ‑‑ so the situation 10 years ago was completely different one. We were very cautious and the best we could get out of that discussion was that copyright was still relevant for promoting content, but needed to adopt. In other words, it was ‑‑ evolve or perish, basically. And among many people, the IGF secretly, or sometimes openly, I think the majority were sort of hoping towards, lag towards the second option. They were thinking that the copyright was going to not resist to technologic evolution, or could not stand through the revolution of the internet.
I think 10 years later we can all agree at least on two points. We're not saying everything is perfect, but copyright didn't perish, it's still here. And users as ‑‑ have unprecedented access to the widest variety of content, meaning all live music, and sports events, UGC, news, fake or quality news, anything. Anything. So basically we can ‑‑ that's already in our circle. It didn't stand in the way of healthy development of this digital content.
I'm not saying everything is perfect. But there's still many challenges, but we succeeded to continue delivering the mission of incentivizing content, therefore access to it. And went through this natural selection process almost Darwinian memories, I think matured from many lessons learned, but also stronger, and reinforced. Because the content creator industry is in much better shape compared to 10 years ago. Here I must make a disclaimer that not ‑‑ it's not the same talking to the music industry than publishing, or video games, of course, and among those sectors there are different players. So again, it's not the same talking to music producers or a session musician.
How did we do that? Of course this ‑‑ there was a development, an evolution that was much needed, it happened, it was revolutionary, and covered several aspects. One, from a norm perspective, we had unprecedented changes in the norms, nothing similar happened in the past. Copyright reforms were on the table all over the world, and still are. Countless ‑‑ directives, European level, music in the U.S., Australia, UK discussing one, South Africa, Nigeria just implemented one, Uruguay, yesterday, countless. Everywhere.
So the system is evolving, but the most extraordinary changes are I think in the way copyright is exercised and licensed, and so stakeholders made ‑‑ sat down at the table and found a way to make things that were unworkable, finally workable.
I want to end this now, but happy to do it later, there are three, many success stories, three very well related to what was discussed 10 years ago. One is open access, open source, open licensing, and all that. I think it's almost a settled issue. Back then we were saying copyright is not fit for purpose, because there are so many open crowd initiatives going on, and IP is not serving those purposes. That was not the case, it's not the case, because actually it's flexible enough to make it happen, plus limited exceptions. I'm happy to develop on that.
User content, literally there was one of the outcomes of 2014, IGF was UGC is nonresolvable issue. It's showcasing how copyright and reality are completely displaced and mismatched. Why? Because for any one of us taking a video and synchronizing a song or modifying a picture found on the internet, entails a number of copyright exclusive rights. So you need to ask the permission to do that. Individually. Back then, you want a piece of music on your video, you need to go and knock on the door of the producer to get that. Similar, you get a picture online, you need to ask the permission to do that.
So we're saying it's not going to work. And yeah, but you cannot do that. 10 years from now, we have TikTok. We have ‑‑ we have countless UGC services that are legal and we can discuss, people are unhappy about how much money they're getting, but that's another issue. So copyright, it can be adapted, that's a business.
The other great success story is streaming. But that would give me ‑‑ I would need at least half an hour, but streaming, in 2013, was like, wow, it's going to destroy the music industry!
It cannot happen. And now the music industry is built up on ‑‑ over, I think it's 63% to the music market is digital these days. And of course not everyone is equally happy, but things are working well from everyone, users and stakeholders.
So I think those are the suck stories, and we can discuss more about the details of those changes and what's next.
>> Thank you. We'll probably come back to several of those issues.
Konstantionos, you were on a panel yesterday that was talking about fragmentation, and I thought, this ‑‑ this came up as well, that some people's fragmentation is just a distributed network. Depends on where you sit and where you're thinking about this. And so in the 10 years that have been discussing this since 2013, how are the distribution networks varying on this, and are we getting into more challenges with governments because of what we just heard about with all this new content, or are the networks not affected by the fact that we just have lots of content and it's making it where people want it to go?
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me here. Just a small correction. I am no longer with the Internet Society, just to make sure, you know, this is on the record.
So one of the things I think that over the past 10 years there have been a lot of lessons learned. I remember when I started 10 years ago I was hired to do copyright, and I was hearing there were some strong voices that was claiming that we need to kill the internet because it's going to kill copyright. And of course this didn't happen. And of course both copyright ‑‑ Paolo is right, both copy and the internet adjusted and they found a way to collaborate, right? They found a way to coexist in a system that, and in an environment that is evolving so fast, and it's changing so fast.
And I was having a conversation with Glenn this morning, and we were talking about oh, perhaps we ‑‑ could we have predicted the TikTok, or the user generated content that exploded, or the streaming services? And if we had predicted that, what would we have done? And we both concluded that it's actually really good that we didn't predict, because it demonstrates both the flexibility of copyright as Paolo said, but also the ability of the internet, you know, to bring us new challenges all the time, and adapt to those challenges.
I think that what we are seeing currently and what is really fascinating for me is that the way content is created has exploded. There is really not ‑‑ content creation is no longer a monolith. In the old days, you had very specific actors that were creating content and they were very much responsible for distribution of this content. But right now literally everyone is creating content, and the tools that are allowing you to create content have multiplied exponentially. ChatGPT, AI tools, augmented reality, you have influencers creating content and claiming copyright. You have all these different services that allow you to be part of this copyright regime that was so very much exclusive in the beginning, or before the internet and in the early days of the internet.
Now, I think that networks had to adjust to that reality, and they had to figure out how to cope with exactly what Glenn said in the beginning. Video. That is where we are from a user's perspective. Users want to stream, users want to watch video. Users ‑‑ they want to have access to content that is as interactive as possible. And I think this is going to accelerate as the new tools are coming in. So there is a very, very valid question, and I am very ‑‑ Glenn and I met 10 years ago, practically, and 10 years ago he was telling me that I am working in order to make networks better.
So I saw him this morning, "What are you working on this days?"
Literally he said, "What I was working on 10 years ago."
I was like, "Oh, hmm."
But then you realize that this is exactly what we need to be working on, right? How to create ‑‑ how to make the internet more efficient for users to create and consume video. Sorry, content. Because not everybody wants to create content, but there's a lot of consumption.
We're at a place, I think, a very interesting place where I have to admit, I never thought I would say that, we are seeing, if copyright and the internet were in a relationship, wherein, in the beginning and they were not really getting along, right now they're sort of, they have figured it out, they have their tensions, they have their problems, but they're not divorced. Which for me, is a really, really healthy place to be. In many different ways.
>> So we have a healthy relationship that is continuing to blossom. We're going to Geoff, did you need to get in there?
>> Do I knee to update my job description as marriage counselor?
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: That is great, actually.
>> Do we have Geoff?
>> GEOFF HUSTON: Yes, you do.
>> Thank you for joining us. Sorry you're not here in person.
You have joined the gentlemen here, but you're also, how are we doing technically, have we done ‑‑ has it survived as well as it feels like to the common user? It seems like the technical aspects of the internet have just flourished and you guys have been doing an amazing job making sure all this content gets delivered to where it wants to go.
>> GEOFF HUSTON: Over the last 10 years, I think we've rebuilt the internet completely. It's not what it was 10 years ago, and it's certainly not what it was 20 years ago. The transformative technology oddly enough was the evolution of mobile phones. Mobile telephony took over telephony. The sheer convenience of having it in your pocket all the time transformed that industry. When that industry turned, the initial offering of the iPhone, everybody has a mobile internet device. It completely transformed the internet. Because all of a sudden this wasn't the library anymore. We weren't creating data. These weren't institutions of knowledge. We'd become an entertainment business. And our population wasn't just a few million. All of a sudden we were looking at a global market of billions. Billions.
Now, that massive expansion, the mobile industry certainly coped in giving everyone internet devices. The content industry was under extraordinary pressure, I suppose the prize ‑‑ to create entertainment across that platform.
A long time ago, 15 years, the network was used to get users to the services they wanted to find. It was like a road system. Where are you going, let me take you there. But you can't scale that. It's tee hard.
And so under the enormous pressure of volume, of scale, and money, we rebuilt the internet completely. And it's just as well ‑‑ helped us. These days computing is just prolific. Super computers on your wrist is just what we wear. Storage is just abundant like crazy. Terabytes of information on your phones, this is insane.
And of course what we're also finding is carriage is now cheap. We talk about moving information on fibre optic cables as if it was commonplace, and it is.
That combination has changed the network. Instead of going to find your content, content comes to your door. Content is right beside you, we've rebuilt the network using content distribution techniques, to actually make sure that the content is there just in case you need it. Across all the major markets of the internet. We're transformed adjust in case ‑‑ just in time, let me get the packet for you, into adjusting case model, we're within a few small miles or kilometers. There's literally ‑‑ oddly enough, it's not volumes of written data, it's video. It's all the other things we do. And then we've leveraged that infrastructure to actually provide real time services such as this video conversation, we're actually talking not directly over the internet, but from data center‑to‑data center.
So we're now living in an entirely different entity. The role of the internet service provider is now local. The larger move the data around, oddly enough is being privatized, and in essence that's no longer a public carriage function. But an attribute of the large‑scale content data. And the role of how to accomplish content has changed enormously. The citizen publisher is now a customer of Azure, any of the other commercial service providers.
So it's changed where the money is, it's changed where the content and focus of engineering is, it's actually changed the engineering and architecture of the internet. Why? Because as long as we can build it like this, it's cheaper, it's faster, and it meets the demands of literally billions of people every hour of the day.
So, yes, the last 10 years has been a wild ride. Thank you.
>> SHANNON TEWS: That's very helpful. One of the issues 10 years ago was the challenge between north and south. Is part of this equalization and the rebuilding of the internet, this is an open question, was still this feeling of there was a division of where they were spending money on infrastructure? It's still a bit of a challenge, but I think in the point of mobile is a great one. The mobile carriers and the ability to use the network, I think has ‑‑ we've done some work on that, but are we still struggling with the north‑south divide, or have we done a better job of making sure everybody who wants to put content on the internet or watch content on the internet now has the ability to do that with some level of device in their hand or in their presence? It's an open question for any of you. No?
>> I'll ‑‑
>> SHANNON TEWS: It was a question 10 years ago. No one has asked that question in years. Maybe that's the measure ‑‑ it's not ‑‑ nothing is ever solved. But it's no longer the ‑‑ it's not something sequester all talking about. As Geoff said, we've reengineered the internet. Part of that has been to make it scale. And part of it is evolving it so that the way the content creators use it, has evolved. And it's not ‑‑ is it ever perfect? It will never be perfect. That's good, because I like keeping a job doing this work. But we've had great progress.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Okay.
>> GEOFF HUSTON: Could I relate an experience? Coming from India, one of the most dramatic rollouts in the last 10 years has been connecting hundreds of millions of (indiscernible) across the entire Indian subcontinent, It's an engineering feat, truly a wonder over the last 10 years. One of their major targets, major roles was to integrate content provision, those boxes that sort of deliver the streaming data, whatever, deliver that inside their network. So this wasn't a subcontinent pulling data from the rest of the world on demand. Largely, it was trying to contain this problem into feed the data once, and deliver the data to users many times. And the entire rollout actually had as much emphasis on integration of content and service into those networks as it did in actually building the network infrastructure that connected the users.
So we're now seeing the network and content coupled more closely in terms of the service model we deliver. And that is a dramatic change in the way we do architecture, the way we do infrastructure, and oddly enough, the way we pay for it as well.
So big changes, yes.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Great, Konstantionos?
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: So I think the north‑south conversation about content is really the conversation that we have been having about digital divides, right? Because in order to create content you need connectivity. It's as simple as that. I think that with of course the smartphones and the fact that everybody has really gone mobile, we're seeing more content creation, and certainly going back you don't need to ask permission to upload anything on the internet, a as long as you have this access to the internet. And that's why it is always important to go back to this very fundamental values of the internet and try to remember that the internet's architecture overall is based on some very basic principles, and we always need to reflect on how the things that we're doing, whether it's technological things, whether they're policy things, also reflect those values as much as we can. Assist Glenn mentioned permission innovation, he didn't use those words, but he said I can upload something without permission, and I know 10 years ago it was whoa, no one can talk about it because everybody was misinterpreting it. But right now we're at a place where we see the value of that principle and of that value. So it is very important to remember that ‑‑ I do not have data, I suspect that there is more content created in the north, and ‑‑ in the global north and the global south consumes more content than it creates. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done to create those networks, right, that are resilient enough. And are able to support content creation in those countries.
So there is ‑‑ if there's some sort of a chain reaction happening, so we cannot really talk about how the global south is sort of creating content, if we don't have first a conversation about how it is connected and how meaningful this connectivity is to use a term that the U.N. loves.
>> SHANNON TEWS: That seems to be, I have a Brazilian brother‑in‑law and he's always introduced me to things that are highly entertaining. So ‑‑ but it's ‑‑ that is actually just my use of my network to learn about things that are going on. It isn't a technical feasibility challenge of, you know, the haves and have‑nots that we had 10 years ago.
I think you mentioned several things in your opening statement about the ‑‑ your point about, you can put anything up, but the question is, should we keep all these things up and realize it's a technical, not so much a content‑driven conversation. Thoughts on what do we do with the fact that everybody can put everything up all the time, yet you've found a way to manage through the challenges that 10 years ago were just hard no, take it down, and now ‑‑ because so many people are creators, they want to be in on this as well. They don't want to be taken down. They want their content up as the rest of the world does.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Let me also make ‑‑ add something about north‑south debate, and a bit of content.
I think in terms of creativity and cultural products, the north‑south debate is way ‑‑ is a bit old in terms of content creation. We have countries that are not considered as north.
>> SHANNON TEWS: I think part of it that we've gotten rid of that thought process.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: ‑‑ in Asia that made revolution of their economy, like Indonesia, South Korea, and African ‑‑ so countless example of countries that cannot be considered north, actually overflowing the world with their content.
The best example, if you look at the charts all over the world about music streaming, who is heading, leading, Latino music. And you cannot ‑‑ that is a fact, and it was enabled also by the technology.
In terms of ‑‑ if you go to a complete different sector, publishing, education, those remain local content, high in demand. Needed. And the technology is enable all that. Beyond ‑‑ and I think there is ‑‑ the technology is also enabling things that were unthinkable 10 years ago. Like serving language diaspora. I mean ‑‑ and you get people ‑‑ Italian diaspora and the U.S., but African diaspora, everywhere, they get to access the super compelling top‑notch content produced in their home countries. And this is another extremely good story to tell. And there was some fear that it was going to lead to a sort of affect the cultural diversity, the fact that the channels were sort of handled by a handful of people coming from the north, in certain instances it may be the case, but there is a recent study about music charts all over the world, and in countries where there are not English speakers, like Korea, Japan, Italy, Sweden, and the top chart are all national artists.
So how did we ‑‑ I don't think the copyright was only part of that solution. If you get rid of copyright, that would have never happened, because those ‑‑ I go back to the first question. It depends which country we're talking about. Copyright applies both to my small cousin birthday video uploaded on YouTube, your pictures around Kyoto, copyright is applicable. But it also needs to function when you put hundreds of millions of dollars introducing a blockbuster video game, a movie, or you have to pay the salaries of journalists that are informing the world about what's happening.
So copyright works well, and flexible whenever we're talking about UGC not necessarily commercial created content that allow you to do many things, but at the same time, did well in continuing to incentivize and rewarding the investment behind professionally created content that.
Was a huge challenge 10 years ago, and there were like many saying, it needs to change, because it's not working for UGC. In fact, we are showing that it can work for both scenarios.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Geoff, I'm just checking in. Any additional comments on this conversation?
>> GEOFF HUSTON: Yes. We didn't build the content network we had today in the way we had envisaged it. We had thought 20, 25 years ago of the citizen publisher, my website as big as your website, even if your name is Rupert Murdoch, or someone else. We were all able to create and publish our content as equals. That never happened. What happened instead, oddly enough, is as we transformed the internet with content and service, we empowered the intermediaries, we empowered the middle agents, the folk who aggregated and licensed this content, and deliver it through content distribution networks. It is no surprise that Google has the size it does. It is no surprise that (indiscernible) is a major player.
These intermediaries are astonishingly power willful. What they deliver is a uniform product to a global market. So while folks demand the content may reflect a rich cultural diversity, they may honour various forms of copyright, and that's true. Underneath it all, we've actually built a relatively weird distortion where a small number of these content intermediaries are astonishingly powerful and large. And they effectively dominate this entire industry. My own website, if I hadn't put it into a content distribution network, would be in a lost, forlorn and dusty corner of the internet. I couldn't get the market, the attention, the eyeballs, whatever, that we seem to want from this.
And so in unleashing this enormous amount of content, we've also empowered a relatively small collection of intermediaries, to actually assume a very dominant role of control in running and operating these content distribution systems.
So winners and losers inside all of this. I think the underlying lesson is, the way things pan out never works according to anybody's plan. What actually happens is technology produces surprising solutions, and the amount of money and the ability of markets to respond is actually met with very quickly on solutions that work, and transform the industry every time. Is the industry reinvents itself every five years. There's no constancy inside this industry. Any business plan that's five years old is not a business plan anymore, it's a historical archive. That's not going to stop any time soon. So, yes, this is a very live area and demands an extra amount of business agility and risk to play in this game.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Thanks.
You brought up sports and gaming, which seems to me have gotten to be a much broader worldwide audience than we might have had 10 years ago. Is that correct?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Absolutely. I think it's ‑‑ those are areas where we see a constant growth in terms of demand and offer. And where there is also a busy activity of policymakers in order to make sure people investing their money in getting the people to watch games and play video games around the world are safe.
And it's very much linked to what was just mentioned about the power of intermediaries. And here it was never ‑‑ I told at some point someone was going to say copyright is the reason why everything is centralized. In fact, it's not. It's one of the few areas that is distend example in the middle, and that is called internet service providers, liability ‑‑ safe harbors that are still keeping busy, countries all over the world, in this forum those policies have been seen as the ultimate evil, but in fact, are the only way you can actually give control to the producer of the content instead of the distributor of the content.
We also saw another trend that in many instances, there is no more demarcation between producer and distributor, Netflix. They do it themselves. So it's ‑‑ so video games, huge wonderful stories to tell. In the 10 years, their business models shifted completely from console hardware‑based business, to mostly online, global interactive gaming. All covered ‑‑ it's an IP‑intensive industry. Video games is IP, not only copyright, of course, but video games. Growing fast over 2 billion ‑‑ 200 billion U.S. dollar protect projected for this year, meaning depending how you count it, it's larger than audio‑visual and/or music. Sometimes together. And it's a wonderful story, no one is complaining about, and IP was behind it.
Sports, it's ‑‑ it's big complex debate. We had the WTO ruling on that, it's part of copyright in the sense that it's related to copyright, it's not creative content as such, but there are rights for broadcasters or people that are organising events to control who has access to it. And it has more money involved than the traditional operating industries.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Did ‑‑ going to almost zero latency in many ‑‑ people should always talk about Korea, the reason why gaming was so big there, it felt like you were 100% interactive at the moment.
So more places able to come to as close as zero latency as possible I imagine has helped that entire environment as well.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Yeah, absolutely. Technology enabled all that, and what I forgot to mention, all these huge and fantastic deals that can be carefully crafted in meetings room with lawyers and business people, at the end of the day, nowadays, they count nothing unless you have engineers make it happen. And not only in terms of users, but even in the ‑‑ making sure the revenues are shared and people are identified, you need technology. And that is of course from both sides. We are nothing without engineers.
>> SHANNON TEWS: We didn't talk about the COVID effect of the fact that all the trends that changed in its location, but yet didn't seem to cause any real problem. So first responders, engineers, we should give you guys more beer and places and say thank you.
>> GLENN DEEN: Gosh. That's a lot of interesting stuff. I looked at bringing all these thoughts from Paolo and Geoff together. And talk about today, and the unique things that are going on now that weren't 10 years ago.
So in some ways you said I could describe myself as a marriage counselor. I like to say I do IP so you can do IP. I do IP networks, you do frameworks. We both work in the world of IP. And that's kind of remarkable. When I started doing this job, about 10 years ago, and I came to my first IGF, I started participating actively at the ITF. A lot of people said, you're from a movie studio, why are you ‑‑ what are you doing here? Why?
10 years later, that's not even a question. I was here at the IGF down stairs, Sony, I think they're games division is down stairs with a booth at the IGF showing a technical solution for how they deliver game updates during COVID and how they reengineered how they did that, so that when people were home and wanted to play games, they could get the games and get the updates they needed. It was wonderful. Nobody even questions you anymore why a content guy is at the IGF or content guy is at the ITF.
And I think that's the business really positive aspect of this progression we've seen. We brought the IP frameworks, the IP networking together, that brought, enabled a platform for the business people that pay the bills, that pay for me to do my work, and everybody else to do their stuff, to get comfortable with the internet as the platform for their next generation, right? Streaming. And that has caused an evolution that we only could have dreamt of back in the day.
What I mean by that specifically, we went from, if you look back to 2012, most video on the internet was either standard def or lower quality. Really terrible quality video. We went from standard def to HD, now 4k, it's common on the internet. Each of those little jumps is easy to say, it's four times the amount of data. SD to HD is four times the amount of data. SD to 4k is 16 the amount of data. What's enabled that is that the business of content creation, content distribution, came to the party and said this is important, they invested the funds, they invested the engineers in advancing those fields. So that our codex are much more efficient than they were in the past. Our network transports have much lower latency. 10 years ago we never talked about latency. It was a thing we lived with. Now at the places like the ITF it's one of the things we talked about the most. There's L4S, which is an initiative for lower latency. If people say, we ‑‑ what did you do in your marriage counseling business, latency is the thing I'm working on big‑time, because live sports. And sports brings people together. It isn't just watching live sports, it's sitting in the stadium and being able to chat with their friends on your phone while you're watching the game. The friends may be at home watching on T.V. I literally had the experience of being in the stands and a friend texted and said, just saw you on camera!
And he was sitting at home. We were waving to each other. That's cool. I couldn't imagine doing that 10 years ago. But I am going to come off as sort of, isn't this wonderful!
I think it is wonderful. We've had investment that made problems that we were afraid of go away. And it's opened new things that are interested challenges like the latency problem to work on. It's fascinating and we continue to evolve. I find that very excited, because it means we're not done. We're continuing to find interesting things to work on. But at the end of the day. IP networks and IP frameworks, we work together in harmony, not always perfectly, but we've worked together to enable the business guys to do their own thing. Now we sometimes say we don't like what they've done, I myself will never appear in a TikTok video, but, you know. Anyway.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Konstantionos, you have a comment on this topic?
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Yeah. Just very quickly. As both Paolo and Glenn were talking, I was thinking that effectively all of us that, you know, we're speaking in the IGF, working at the ITF, or working at WIPO and thinking of these things, ultimately it's about the user, right? Everyone is working for the user. And I think what is interesting in the past 10 years is that the user really took us to the direction that they wanted, and they very much indirectly and silently in many ways, they said we need those things in order to be able to participate and continue participating in the internet. We need better networks. Because we want these networks to be able to stream video if I walk downtown Tokyo. We need better policy frameworks, because I am seeing that, you know, the licensing regime and copyright has created problems because when I'm traveling, I cannot take the content with me, having access to the content. So we're seeing also this change in the way those policy frameworks think about those things.
So for me, it's really interesting that we always need to go back and one of the things I have realized in doing this and thinking about the internet is that ultimately it always comes down to the user. So it is very, very important in those conversations to not forget the users, and what they want, and not to underestimate where they can take us. Because we are here where we are with all these new technologies and exciting things happening, whether it's streaming, whether it is whatever, because of the users.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Did you have ‑‑
>> JIM PRENDERGAST: We have a comment and question from the measurement lab. 2.6 billion people are not online and more do not have meaningful connectivity. Access is still very much an essential concern. We work on measuring the quality of ‑‑ using those to support increases and services and infrastructure development in underserved areas.
How might we do this better, even without reporting from service providers?
>> SHANNON TEWS: Who would like to go first? Geoff, snots do you want to jump in on this one?
>> GEOFF HUSTON: Yes, I have some thoughts here.
Part of this is the beauty of markets is also a weakness. In transforming this industry from one that was orchestrated from the middle out, which is where the telephone system was, the telephone company defined what the service was, how it was provided, and oddly enough, one of the defining instruments of that whole regime was universality of service and access. That goes back over 120 years. Everybody had universal service. It was actually echoed then in electricity rollouts 10 years later.
The internet was never built like that. It was built as a market response. It was actually unleashing that sort of solid conservative view from telephony into one that chased where users spent money.
Now, the problem, as we all find with this, is that the richer the user, the more determined the chase for their money. And so rich markets are extensively served with extraordinary amounts of technology. And the hope is amongst much of this industry, that as the technology improves, it gets cheaper and gets more accessible to those areas with low versions per capita GDP than similar metrics.
Ultimately high‑speed networks in remote and impoverished areas demands a level of capital intensity which is challenging for any investor.
Interestingly, solutions are appearing which are unorthodox. And I've certainly been tracking where Starlink has been going with its service. All of a sudden over every part of the sea and land on this planet, we can drop in excess of 50 to 60 megabits per second anywhere. Anywhere. At not eye‑watering price, at prices which currently are affordable in a western context than if the pace of technology keeps on going, would be afforded universally. Because once connectivity is an abundant good, no a restricted and scarce good, everything changes.
We fall into a trap of assuming the world we have today is constant. The silicon folk think an entirely different view. Everything doubles in two to three years, stuff gets cheaper, stuff gets smaller, and stuff gets faster. So ‑‑ faster. So the situation we find ourselves in today will change over the next few years. I suspect one of the enabling technologies will be space‑based to get over some of these issues with the extraordinary amount of capital intensity required to wire up those parts of rural and remote that the existing technology models won't service.
I applaud an initiative in Mongolia which certainly has a large amount of extremely remote populated areas, and actually doing a service based around Starlink to provide modern, extremely high‑speed connectivity, to astonishingly isolated and remote communities who don't have extensive power. This is all battery power. And it works.
So certainly I am optimistic about being able to drop the threshold into more challenging markets. And certainly I see the technology shifts are essential to do that. Because the existing models won't carry us into those spaces. It's an evolving picture.
So I'm optimistic.
>> SHANNON TEWS: That's very helpful. I think Project Kuiper, I think they launched two satellites in the past week and I know they're planning on a huge constellation. Is this just a case of we're expecting to see more coverage and we will eventually see a lowering of the price point now that we've proven if you're in Mongolia you can probably go almost anywhere, but not necessarily pulling wire, but using the spectrum we have in space?
>> GEOFF HUSTON: There are five massive projects that are certainly on the drawing boards and in various stages of sophistication. So, yes, Project Kuiper, there is a Chinese project that's on the drawing board, and of course Starlink. The launch costs are coming down, because the launch costs are coming down, we're contemplating an entirely different future now in this area. Particularly in rural and remote. And for countries like even Australia and New Zealand, which are plagued by large amounts of sparsely inhabited areas, these kinds of technologies make astonishing difference to a picture of a national community drawn together through a digital sort of medium.
So, yes, I am less concerned at this point that the situation we have with the remaining 2.6 billion, I don't think it's intractable. I do believe over the coming few years, technology solutions will actually apply to their part of the world as much as our part, the developed part of the world.
>> SHANNON TEWS: I always wonder if there's going to be ‑‑ 10 years ago Belize would say, come to Belize, we're not connected. You want to take a vacation, don't talk to me for five days.
Stella, you are studying a lot of these, and one of the things you mentioned when we were talking at the beginning was that it's interesting being here in Japan because in Southeast Asia and the area that you are from in the world, looks to Japan for a lot of the copyright laws and I.P. laws that you're currently studying. So talk about that, and you're a digital native. You grew up with this. So a lot of this might seem like a bunch of wire talk, because it's always been there to you.
>> STELLA ANNE MING HUI TEOH: Thank you for the question. Actually, I just want to hop back to a little bit on the topic of the global north and south divide. Actually, one of the issues that we saw during the COVID pandemic was that, yes, there may be importance and prioritization in network access, but one of the key barriers was the cost of devices. So a lot of households in Malaysia, for example, you would see one household would be sharing one device and it's a matter of prioritization of who gets to use it and who gets that access. Which relates to what we're talking about for the youth, when it comes to more of the privileged side of perhaps those who have their own devices, so one of the issues or one of the worries that we have regarding content and open access content and fair use of content, is that a lot of youths may start out as content creators related to maybe fan related content. So fan‑created art, fan‑created videos, et cetera so I would like to ask the panel later about their thoughts on how that may see ‑‑ the future of that.
And then on the topic of IP, one of the things we also see is that as youth creators, sometimes some of the things we create on ‑‑ and share online gets fed into the algorithms and then ultimately that's an issue that we worry that later on as youths, our work or the work of those who are involved in that community ultimately will be used to feed into a larger programme and then we won't get the credit, and we ultimately just have to fade away and choose a different kind of thing we want to do.
So, yes, if there are any thoughts on, yeah, the youth role and the youth presence, especially in terms of fan‑created art and fan‑related content.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: It's ‑‑ I'm extremely surprised to hear these comments for the first time, youth components of the IGF is actually claiming for better copyright protection to make sure their work is not going to be used to train machines, right? Or get lost. The distribution of your work is granted.
Well, on paper, everything should work. It's settled. You have rights in all the countries of the world, not all ‑‑ 181 countries of the world. So practically all the country of the world, that would assure that you have the right of being recognised, attributed as the order of work. And you cannot waive it. You can renounce to exercise it, you cannot transfer it to your employer. That's the moral right.
Then the real answer is, how do you make sure of the question, how do you make sure this actually happens? Again, we have to turn to technologists. But there are water marking technologies, there are ‑‑ there is a protection of rights management information, enshrined in copyright laws that are there exactly to serve the purpose you are measuring.
Anything else would be way too technical, but the law is already there, and also the technology. There is a huge debate, and it's not about youth, it's about all sorts of professional content creators, that they don't want to see their content use toed to train machines, it would eventually compete with them. Think about if you were a professional composer. Or if you are a journalist, or ‑‑ that's not specific to youth. This IGF is devoting 80% of its meeting time to that debate.
The first question I ‑‑ I think it's the fine art is part of UGC debate, it's oftentimes derivative work, so if it's done in the context of platforms, like TikTok, or Instagram, or Meta, Facebook, those practices are often covered and regulated by the terms of use, taking into account copyright, so in certain frameworks, this is solved by end of use and licensing practices, and that's something that didn't happen in the past. Outside of those platforms, if you create something based, someone else's creation, we, commercial purpose ‑‑ with a commercial purpose, I have bad news, you need to go and get the we mission, but there are clearinghouses, there are places where you go to one place and you get the right to do that.
>> SHANNON TEWS: My understanding, it's having tool sets that are built into maybe the platform that you choose to put your information on, so you don't have to ‑‑ you don't have to do it from start. It's like the old days where you think, Geoff, you're mentioning your blog and having to make sure it gets in the right place, and so when you're doing this, having those tools will help you protect your work from the beginning?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Very practically, I don't know ‑‑ I'm not using TikTok. But if you do something on TikTok, and you pick a soundtrack, it's identified, and part of the money that TikTok is generating through advertisement or their business model would go through a collective organisation to the owner of that song you're using in your video. So that you can do that without infringing copyright. But that's within the TikTok framework. If you take that video and you put it and you broadcast it on T.V., no. You can't do it. You should get ‑‑ so it's extremely complex, but frankly, there are meaningful progresses in this space. If you ask rights holders, they would say the money received by those platforms are too low, it's not enough. But that's a business discussion. Supported by some principle established in the norms.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Did you have a second question?
>> STELLA ANNE MING HUI TEOH: Actually, yes. It's kind of related, but I'm not sure if it was already covered.
On the topic of the language barrier, I do know, for example, youth ‑‑ we have like strong online presence, as you said, digital natives, during COVID was an opportunity for a lot of us to connect, if we had the opportunity, to connect online. And what we saw was that, for example, there are like certain perhaps books or comics, etc., that are not available in the native language, and you get people who offer to translate for that particular piece of work. But it's not an official translation. And then they monetize that. So I think that was ‑‑ that's an issue in which it's odd to see a youth creator who also wants to have their IP protected, but they're also actively engaging in that kind of activity in which they're essentially taking someone else's and translating as well. So the issue, any thoughts on that issue?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: It can be a new market. The first question I have for you, are we talking about human translations, or someone offering to take text and put it into ChatGPT translated?
>> STELLA ANNE MING HUI TEOH: Actually, both.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Well, it's pretty different. Because ‑‑ anyway, from a legal perspective, if you take a book and you want to translate it into a language that is not offered yet, you can't do it. You have to ask the permission. You have to ask the permission. Oftentimes ‑‑ I mean, if it doesn't exist and it depends on the specific market, because that would be literature. How would you go about translating a movie? That would be dubbing. It's a completely different story. How would you do that for music?
So it's literature, there are practices about doing that, but translation of literature is still managed individually.
If it's done by a human, then that translation is a derivative work, it's protected, and you can make money out of it. So go home, do it. People ‑‑ that's how you expand and spread knowledge around the world. There is need for that. But cannot be done without getting the permission.
>> SHANNON TEWS: We have done our first hour, good job, everybody. I am going to open this to questions, and I appreciate that we have people here in the room, thank you for joining us at the large dais.
Do you have something online? No? Okay. How are you this morning? Do you want to join into this discussion? Okay. Thanks.
>> Thank you very much. Fascinating discussion of wealth of perspectives, I would say as somebody who works for the professional sector, the first thing I would agree with what I've heard about the false prophecies of 10 years ago whereby copyright was going to break the internet, it's refreshing to hear that there's a degree of ‑‑ a fair degree of consensus that it hasn't. In fact, in terms of our observation of the milieu of professional individual production, one of the hopeful stories in terms of capacity building in the last decade has been the eagerness and success with which young producers in their ‑‑ in certain areas of the global south have access to copyright framework. Mastered the knowledge that they needed in order to support their activities of professional content production, and tried to build IP values within their companies, which are I remind people here is essential in order to have basic access to the capital that you require to pay your employees, to develop the next piece of content, we have a very complex product cycle in (no audio)io‑visual, it takes months, years, to the point it can go into production.
So this accessing of the copyright framework has proven a boon to content that ultimately ends up on the internet services. And it's been I think conclusively proven that the two systems are meant for each other.
The thing I would say without meaning to rain on anyone's parade very ‑‑ a big story we had from Geoff in particular, which is indeed very positive, is not always borne out by circumstances on the ground. I participate in a network for ‑‑ called the Policy Network on Meaningful Access, we have a session tomorrow afternoon, at 3:15. I will be hearing in particular from two women who run a company in Uganda, a production company, they've been trying to run a sustainable audio‑visual production company in this neck of the woods, it's proving quite complex. One of the reasons why, we've seen until certain parts of Africa countries jumping at technological paradigm, and where you would have had a more complex value chain for audio‑visual output in the past, you now basically are relying on internet services to pre‑buy or buy your content in order to access your public and satisfy consumer demand.
These people play a crucial role, because they're making local content in local languages. Uganda may be spoken by 25 million people plus, in terms of its nonparticipation in globalization, in academic global lie sayings, it still makes it a minority language. If it's not spoken, used to reflect people's lives back at them, it's going to disappear or become marginalized. So the work they do on the ground is essential in the participation it constitutes to maintaining linguistic diversity and cultural diversity.
The trouble they have, very often is that this ‑‑ the content they make is vulnerable to market failure, and if it cannot find a buyer in the streaming environment, then they are left with a very problematic situation.
One of the things they observe on the ground also is that the broadband mobile services that consumers and citizens have access to, the pricing points are not always adequate to the spending power of local people. That, if you need to spend 7Gs of your bundle you've prepurchased, and you've run out of Gs by the time you reach episode two of a series, something is not quite working between supply and demand in this area.
So ‑‑ and also the quality reliability of this ‑‑ is problematic. Back to perhaps what Konstantionos was saying, it's really important to continue the work of deploying a reliable infrastructure with a variety of pricing points that reflect the local purchasing power, and to enable, again, the making of content that is culturally relevant, these people have made recently a film about a neurodivergent kid growing up in a traditional village, in Uganda, and subject to the prejudices of his milieu, and they regard their mission as being one of educating and engaging people on women issues, on educational issues, and so on. If they don't have a sustainable model to do it, something is not quite working.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Stay with the microphone, because you brought a very interesting point on just the economics and the challenges. The very beginning of the internet, there was just this hope that we were democratizing, people would be able to find each other anywhere, very easily, and part of our challenge now is the societal bubbles we live in, to get our own into the ‑‑ the algorithm repeats what we want to see over and over again. I might want to watch this content, I didn't know it existed until now. How do they break through that barrier? Is it ‑‑ it isn't just a network issue, it's also a finding out that it's there and getting it out into the wild.
>> Well, first of all, there is good news, I ‑‑ I think Geoff made the point which I think is a contention point, that there's a tendency of concentration in marketplace for services. I sort of beg to differ. It's not that intense, that there isn't competition arising. In fact, the rollout of the large American streamers in some of these markets is as often triggered a kind of dynamic response with local services arising to kind of balance the equation. So they're finding these two ladies and they'll talk about it tomorrow, their situation compared to five years ago has improved. They have more markets they can go to to try and sort of persuade someone to put money up front so that they can make the content in the first place. But it remains quite at its first stage of the development, and I think we need to see more competition and the type of service ‑‑ there's two things that's really important here. One is we talk a lot about UGC and we respect UGC and their forms of licensing for UGC as we've heard, it's a very part of the system. But it's so career ‑‑ it's a professional career for people. Why not? Why could you not build sustainable video production business? At an SME level, where you can be nimble, you can address different market segments, and make a living and pay your employees. And so that is a very important notion to the people on the ground who are actually trying to create career tracks for this type ‑‑ based on the delivery of this type of content. Based on living there and having their fingers on the cultural pulse, the socioeconomic pulse.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Thank you.
>> GLENN DEEN: I really like your point about the market. The point you made about the markets. It really ‑‑ it made me think. To Konstantionos' point, we've always said we build the internet for users. That's a ‑‑ it's a truism. But it made me reflect that one of the things that is also true is that who that user that we built that internet for has evolved and changed. When I started doing my career many years ago, that user at the other end was probably another computer scientist like myself. Now it's everybody. It's creators, and it's the market. It's the people participating in the markets. These markets are built around these frameworks we've created and enabled through the technology, but the users are much more sophisticated, very diverse entity now. It's the viewer. It's the creator, it's the creators that are also viewers. But it's these markets at the end of the day that are enabling the next generation, the next evolution of where we're going, it's ‑‑ because the market enables people to exchange, enables them to get paid for it. And that brings us back to the IP frameworks that the IP networks enable the IP frameworks to enable the markets for all to participate in.
I used to say everybody is a creator. I think I'm going to go back to saying it, because I think it's true. But they want to get paid for it.
>> GEOFF HUSTON: There's a fundamental point here, Glenn, and I think it's a shift of thinking in this digital world. The auto industry scaled up by making one car. One color, one. They scaled by uniformity. The telephone system scaled to reach an astonishing number of people with one concept. Scale and uniformity are hand in hand. I think we're going to ‑‑ we're trained into thinking that markets the sizes of billions is product the size of one. What we're finding, you can see it I think based in advertising networks, digital advertising, we're able to scale at billions yet customize to a market of one. And if you think about how you can use as distributor like Netflix for my Ugandan language video, there is a conversation that works for both producer and distributor. What we're finding in this digital world is the power of this platform actually allows astonishingly fine grain customization of individual markets inside this larger ecosystem.
So you can have any color you want, we don't care. We can produce the artifact at affordable price across a highly diverse market of billions, actually create sustaining businesses and supplying that system across the entire world. It is a different way of thinking. And I'm personally quite optimistic about this. It's no longer one car, one size, one thing. It is actually a market where we can do highly diverse, highly customizable U.N. side one framework, and that's what we're exploring right now. I think will explore over the next five or so years. And oddly enough, things like copyright really help. All of a sudden these authors and producers can say, I'm a market of one westbound my copyright, and the distributor goes, sure, I can accommodate that within the frameworks we have, that serves billions of people. And this is kind of where we're heading with this technology. It is amazing stuff, I believe.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Thanks for that.
Anyone else on the panel want to comment on that?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: The market discussion, I it this reason, a point that was never raised, I only mention there are different stakeholders in the value chain, and different position. There are no first role artists here in the room, on the panel, so I need to anyway highlight the fact that we're talking about extremely positive situation, and I think the focus on our debate was the larger, IP system versus development of internet. What is the impact on content production and access? So the picture is extremely positive. However, in all these debates, if you talk to musicians or if you talk to artists, sometimes they don't feel well treated, and they don't get the money they think they deserve, or they're they used to get from traditional media. This is a fact, it's debated, it's discussed, there are people negotiating that. I think it's mostly a matter of bargaining power, discussion, the trend is positive, but there is discussion over there. One question we ask those that are involved with policy and not with business deals is, I think 13 years ago the subscription fee of certain streaming services was exactly the same as it is today. No? If I'm not mistaken. I don't ‑‑ I want to quote specific ‑‑
>> SHANNON TEWS: Price stabilization? They stopped sending ‑‑
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Certainly not at the pace of inflation. But on the other hand, the content you get is certainly increased. So you have ‑‑ so is it sustainable in terms of ‑‑ we have more product, more content, users get to do more stakeholders, same price, or almost same price, how far we can go that model. We leave it to ‑‑ that's my ‑‑ it's a question, I don't have the answer.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Just very quickly, I think this is a competition issue. The market will sort it out. And we are seeing already some services survive and some services die the quick death in the case of QueueBee, for instance. I think we're going to go through a phase where I feel we are already into the phase of hype where everyone wants to do streaming, because it's the new golden thing. And then some players will survive and some players won't, and content will play the predominant role in order to determine which ones will survive or not, as well as the engineering behind it, and whether you are able to support what you tell me what you're selling me, and you want me to buy.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Did you want to comment on how much content is being done?
>> GLENN DEEN: I don't have numbers to ‑‑ conceptually, we're in a golden age of content creation. There is more content being created both professionally and nonprofessionally than ever in the history of mankind. It's ‑‑ I don't know if this is sustainable or not, I'm an engineer, not an economist, but wow. Get a look back in years to come and say, there was this explosion in the 2020s of content everywhere. Like we've never seen before. When I was growing up, you maybe got a new T.V. show here and there. And you were very excited in the fall when the new shows would come out. Now I'm in this 24/7 cycle, 365 a year, where I'm always finding new content, constantly. It's amazing.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Don't you think this is also because the creation of content has become much cheaper because of the internet?
>> GLENN DEEN: Absolutely. Somebody pointed out there's a new tool for your phone that you can now do cinematic quality video, capture and processing, I think it has AI component, that it's literally like a cinematic quality camera. If you think about that, 10 years ago we would have been talking about the red camera professionally, which was, a very expensive, very unique tool. And now people have it in their hand in their phone and it's a downloadable app? I think it may even be free. Like, wow.
>> My name is ‑‑ I'm from an internet site, I wanted to follow up on your question on global south. And contribute to this debate on copyright.
Our work was mostly related to connecting the remote communities of ‑‑ to on the internet, and once we did that we realized there wasn't much content for the local communities because everything was in Russian or in English, and people wanted content in their language. We thought it would be easy, we will digitize, for example, educational materials that Minister of Education has, books, and we couldn't, because they were all copyright protected. So we asked the Minister of Education, can you give us the copyright? They said, it belongs to the authors. So the ministry pays to have these books, but doesn't want to have the copyright because then there the responsibility of the quality of the book goes to the ministry, and they want to have ‑‑ if there is a mistake, it was the mistake by the author, it's not us, the Minister of Education, but for us it was a challenge, we couldn't digitize these textbooks, and it was actually for us easier to find the copyright‑free creative commons materials from the global experience and then translate it into our language. Rather than digitizing the textbooks that were produced locally. So I think having Creative Commons materials was a really lifesaver for us. Thank you.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Has that market changed since you first started on that? Have you found that there's more in the creative commons than when you first were trying to use copyrighted work?
>> Now we're finding a lot of useful materials, globally. For example, we've adopted GSMA's mobile internet toolkit, into if our language, Microsoft's new materials, they were all of course commercial companies, openly available. Also we wanted to bring scientific experiments to schools, rural schools, we thought we would produce them by ourselves, but it was very expensive. So we found biology, astronomy, physics, experiments, videos, five‑minute, three‑minute videos, online, Creative Commons, and we translated them using voices of real local stars. So in the end, these videos were even more user friendly than the original, because the originals were voiced by scientists. And this time they were voiced by actors.
And I just want to answer, through our work for us we developed several kind of principles that we have been applying now. One was local language first, so anything we do we now do in our language, then mobile first, because rural communities have very few computers, but everybody uses smartphones. And this means, for example, if we do textbooks they can't be just PDF, they have to be ‑‑ you have to be able to make the font smaller, larger. And they cannot be very heavy. So, for example, during COVID, Minister of Education scanned all the books they have, but they were so heavy and the kids when they download one book all their money was gone. So they couldn't use it. Same for video. And we found ways to make them very light, without losing the quality.
>> GLENN DEEN: I want to jump in here and say, one of my other halves, I'm one of the ITF trustees. We manage the IP rights, the copyrights on all the technical standards produced. I just want to chime in and say, when you get to the ITF standards, one of the things we have prebaked into the authorized uses is you can translate them into any language you like. It's already enabled and permission already granted. When you get to the ITF RFCs, up good to go.
>> SHANNON TEWS: Thank you for the question.
We have a question down here. Do you mind identifying yourself? Just push the button.
>> It works, thank you very much.
My name is Peter Polk, I'm the chairman of the World Summit Awards and we have started in 2003 with business process to give global to start a global mechanism of looking at high‑quality content, and in the first year we had 36 countries participating, incomes 2003, and today it's 182 countries. And we have a United Nations system so that from each countries or ‑‑ there is one in eight categories of the action plan, and the same as from the U.S., Australia, or anywhere else.
What ‑‑ I'm actually struck in awe by the quality of your conversation here. I've not been privy and part of it before. And what I want to address here very much is the technologically fueled enthusiasm of Geoff Huston regarding different ways of thinking, and how the technology is actually turning the table upside down every three or five years. Obviously what we have is when we look at quality of content, we have a promise, and Geoff related it to the library model of the internet. Shifting it into the entertainment model and you've heard and also to the mobile evolution. What the business post started off looking at this transformation through the internet, into a knowledge society. That was the idea of the computerization of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. What we see here is that the market is actually very successful, and many of you have really stressed how from copyright, I think Paolo you did your three things regarding how the last 10 years have really shown in terms of user generated content, in terms of open source and so on, how this has actually helped us shape the market in a positive way.
But I would think that we have not a market failure, but a democracy failure. And the issue here is very much that the platform intermediaries, which Geoff has also talked about, and who have such a critical role, they have cannibalized the editorial intermediaries. And that is something which we have to really start thinking about in terms of what you were talking about also, Shannon, regarding the democracy issue. So we are basically creating ‑‑ not just one product for one taste on the scale of billions, but we are creating also social monarchs which are not relating to each other in the participatory way, but they're paralleling each other in their existence, and they are fueled by ‑‑ I don't want to go into the details of the analysis here. But it is from my question is, what is it actually in terms of the positive thinking, what the technology can deliver and what the economics can sustain in terms of quality content regarding what I would think is something like the editorial value add. And that would relate then to something like enlightenment idea of the public sphere, but I don't want to go into that either.
Thank you very much for listening to this.
>> SHANNON TEWS: I appreciate your comments. I'm going to check back in, Luke, did you want to add anything? You've been very patient through this conversation. You've got a microphone.
>> LUKE: I do have one question. Coming from a youth perspective, about copyrights, so on Instagram there is a function to add a sort of audio that you do have to a reel, so when content creators, I'm just curious, that's how you have a song. And you record the song, but you upload as your own audio. So what is the process then when ‑‑ and what happens and how do we educate the youth to better maybe follow the best practices that are already in place, but the youth may not know about these practices?
>> SHANNON TEWS: I think we know who that goes to.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: We can do ‑‑ I think it would be extremely useful, and we should suggest that.
Look, you're talking about your original created music, uploaded on Instagram? Yeah. Well, I think it's something that is ‑‑ I must say I don't know the terms of use, but it must be something similar to what happens in YouTube when you upload your video. Through the process you are basically, there is a disclaimer, you have to assert, you have the rights over that piece of music you are uploading. That's the first thing. If you had the right, you are signing up a nonexclusive licensing agreement through which basically you allow Instagram to make it available. And unless you have a specific content I.D. Or you are a professional author, you ‑‑ artist, you often time don't get any good economic deals out of it.
So it's a good start to make yourself known, to outreach the audience, but what we see is professional artists that normally get a specific deal in order to get some of the revenues generated for advertisement whenever your music is played. So read carefully the terms of use, and if you are planning to be a professional artist, then read even more carefully and ask someone.
But it's basically, it's a copyright licensing, and once you outload that, you can also go somewhere else and do it if it's your song. But first step, you need to make sure it's your creation.
>> SHANNON TEWS: All right. We are at time. Thank you all for being part of this very good discussion. It looks like we survived the last 10 years, I'm hoping we can do this in another 10 and see where we've come in. I want to appreciate everyone's time this morning. Thank you Geoff for coming in remotely and thank you for all of you participating in the audience, and those that helped us coordinate all this. Have a good day at the IGF.
(applause)