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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>> ROXANA RADU: Good morning, everyone. Good morning and welcome to our session entitled satellites, data, action: Transforming tomorrow with digital.
My name is Roxana Radu, I'm an associate professor of digital technologies and public policy at the university of Oxford. It's a great pleasure to moderate this roundtable on the role of law, earth, orbit satellites.
We'll look at how data governance drives the social chance that we're seeing in particular in conflict areas.
This session is closely aligned with the [?] enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development, and sustainability, and benefits from the endorsement of the global academic network on Internet Governance, giga net, and presents some of the results of two projects supported by Internet Society.
It has been convened by professor John from the university of which the cyber hub who will be joining us online as soon as she can. She has a conflict in her schedule, that's why you will see me here instead of her.
We'll discuss some of the key challenges and opportunities associated with low earth orbit or satellite solutions as well as the data sovereignty end goal.
We have three objectives for this session. The first one is to facilitate a broader conversation around this emerging field and also the global implications based on multi stakeholder perspectives.
Second, to zoom in on the challenges of opportunities in conflict areas from multisustainable development and peace building with digital technologies.
And thirdly to sketch out the set of policy recommendations that can hopefully drive more of the dialogue in this space and support policymakers with some of their decisions at both national and international levels.
So we have the following plan for this session. We have three amazing speakers with us today, and we'll give them the floor very shortly. To lead on a particular aspect that they want to focus on for about 12 minutes, to lead a discussion on that. Then we'll take any clarification questions shortly after. We'll give everybody one or two minutes for immediate questions.
Then we will open the conversation for an interactive discussion. We're hoping to get your input as well as other questions and comments from the speakers themselves. So we'll have this moderated discussion for the remaining time. And we're hoping to bring out not only regional experiences, but also some of the global implications for these developments.
And without further ado, I'll give the floor to our first speaker, to Dan York, who is on site. Lucky he managed do this trip to Riyadh. Unfortunately some of us were not as lucky as he was, so we will be joining online.
So Dan is a technology expert an open Internet advocate, author of many books on networking security, IPv6 and Linux and we could go on. He's been involved in leading a particular project back in 2022 on low earth orbit satellites. We'll give him the floor for the opening remarks and then we'll move on to our two other speakers that are joining us online. One of them in London and the other one in the U.S. I'll give you more details shortly.
Dan, you have the floor.
>> DAN YORK: Thank you, Roxana and everybody. Well, I'm loud. Then I can't hear any comments that they make. And I'm falling apart.
Okay. So my name is Dan York, I work for the Internet Society, and I'm going to kind of start by talking a little bit about what are low earth orbit satellites and terminology we'll be use throughout the rest of the presentation that we'll have today. If this works, let's see.
It's not advancing here. This did just work. Let's see. Sorry, folks, we're just experiencing a difficulty with the it was just working when we tested it a minute ago. Okay, we're just going to try switching to a different machine.
Okay. It did work here. It did work here just a minute ago. Okay.
>> We might need to get to PowerPoint on here for PowerPoint to focus.
>> DAN YORK: Okay, now let's try it. Sorry, folks, just getting back to it. Okay, now let me try it. There we go, perfect. Okay.
All right, there we are. So I just wanted to begin by talking a little bit about the power that we see in low earth orbit satellites, whether it's Star Link or One Web or some of these different systems, we are there we go. So this was an example, a picture that I'm showing here, from a community network that was built up in the northwest territories of Canada far up in the arctic area where they had no capability to and get any other kind of sub C cable or anything like that.
So they used a connection through Star Link to connect in and share that connection with everyone else that was there.
In the United States most recently, we had some large hurricanes that came through our area and as part of the disaster response, organizations were using, again, in this case Star Link, to be able to go and help coordinate disaster response and work with us.
They also set up wireless charging stations, they did other things like this. Similarly in that same area, they were using One Web, another constellation, to provide 5G connectivity to people in the local area. These are some of the many examples around how this can be truly life changing in so many different kinds of ways that people have.
The subject we're talking about today is really around these low earth orbit satellites or LEOs. I want to put a couple pieces of terminology in here. If you look at the earth and the or bits that are out there, the traditional satellites that we've used for the last 50 years or are so all out way at the very end in something called geosynchronous orbit which is GEO. That's where the satellites are that do the broadcast TV, communications broadcast, all of that is happening out there. That's been the space where it all goes and has for so many years.
The challenges that it takes a really long time for a signal to get all the way out there and come back. It takes around 600 plus milliseconds, which would mean that we can't do a Zoom call over that kind of connection. It's a very long time.
Things like video calls start to end around 150 milliseconds or so. It takes a long time to get out there and get back.
This is why people have started to do stuff in what's called medium earth orbit in the middle and low earth orbit. But if you do something out at the geosynchronous area, you can use three satellites to get global coverage. But when you start going in lower, you need more. There's a couple of providers that have about 20 satellites in the medium earth orbit. Then as you get down into the low earth orbit under 2,000 kilometers, you get into needing hundreds to then thousands of satellites as you have with Star Link right now.
So there's three parts to a satellite system. One is the satellites. The constellation as we call it of all the satellites that are there. There's also the user terminal, the antenna, the dish, the thing that you're using there. And then there's also the ground stations that connect these constellations to the rest of the Internet. There are policy complications around all three of these different things and they come into play in different ways.
In a typical system, what happens is you go and you are connecting from your dish up to the satellite network and back down to a ground station and out to the public Internet. And this is what a picture typically looks like.
But because these satellites are moving so fast, you might only see one in the sky for about five minutes. It actually looks maybe a little bit more like this where your signals are bouncing off multiple satellites as they're traveling around. This is one of the innovations that happened in the space. But then there was even a little bit more of an innovation which is that what if you're not near a ground station?
You're not able to go and connect to one easily. This is where you might hear about space lasers and stuff like this. This is truly where we are connecting across the constellation to be able to go and have your traffic go across the constellation and then drop down to a ground station somewhere else.
Again, this will have some policy implications as you start looking at this in terms of, well, where is that ground station located? Where is that who's got sovereignty over that, who has control over that? Where is it? You're going across different borders and different things like that.
This is all part of what we're seeing in this environment. As Roxana mentioned, back in 2022 the Internet Society created a document, you can get it at Internet Society.org/LEOs, you can get this document which outlines a lot of the issues and things that have happened.
But a lot has happened in two years. It's amazing to think of what's going on.
The biggest one is that right now there are there have been 7,500, and this number's actually probably wrong because it was from last week and there's probably been a couple of Star Link launches since then. I actually haven't looked.
But there's almost 7,000 satellites just by one company right now up in space that are operating in this kind of thing. Amazing just to see what is happening around this.
We're also seeing a lot of innovation. I don't know if I was at a conference recently where somebody pulled out one of these Star Link mini dishes. He had it in his backpack like a laptop, pulled it out, set it up, he had Star Link connectivity. Amazing the way that we've changed the dynamics of being able to get this kind of access.
I'm a little bit too frugal to go and I don't want to spend the amount of money, the monthly subscription fee, but it's pretty cool. If somebody wanted to give me a gift, I'd love one. But that's not something I want to do, but it's very cool to see what's happening in this kind of space.
People are using this for all sorts of roaming, off grid capabilities. You're getting into some policy things because people are just able to go put this on their car, drive wherever, do whatever, and go into whatever jurisdictions, wherever they kind of are, from a technical point of view they could get connectivity anywhere in the world.
We'll talk about some of the legal aspects of that in a few minutes that are there.
There's also we're seeing it now for in flight connectivity. Many of the airlines are looking they often have had contracts with the geosynchronous providers and now the higher speed and latency because you're closer to the earth, you can have it down to 50 milliseconds. So you can do Zoom calls and streaming video and all these kind of things.
So increasingly we're seeing airlines do it. We're seeing economic models, in some parts of the world they're renting out Starlight dishes, doing other creative ways to get these in the hands of people in some form.
We're resilience in the shape of disaster relief in having additional connectivity. It doesn't necessarily have the same capacity as, for instance, a sub C cable does. Sub C cables are often in Gigabits to terabits of technology.
The State of Maine, which is where I live in the United States, went out and is buying a whole bunch of these dishes to connect people in remote communities where there's no connectivity. You pay a fee for the dish and then a monthly subscription fee. So they're doing work like this to do this kind of thing that's happening.
You're also seeing, and this is the big disruptor that's coming right now, is that these services starting to offer direct to device. So you don't need that dish, you could just use your cell phone. And you're seeing this happening in the United States, Star Link SpaceX has been working with T Mobile to provide this connectivity. And they need to get permission to use Spectrum to communicate with these phones. They need to equip their satellites to transmit. But they've been doing that.
They got approval last month it turn on a trial of connectivity in the United States to do this. They're working with other telecom companies around the world and they're working with other providers. Voda phone here in Europe signed a deal with AST space mobile that's is putting up satellites. This will be direct to your device without the need of a satellite dish and it would give you telecom and also Internet connectivity.
Very different model. It's being fought, of course, by all of the incumbent telecoms, but the other mobile providers who are not you don't have those relationships. But this is from a policy point of view, this is something that's happening. It's already happening in some spaces. There's some island out in the Pacific that already have this enabled through another provider.
All of this is going on. The other part that's happening is you're seeing some more launching of more satellite systems.
You know, China has started to launch their equivalent of Star Link. They have two different constellations they may be launching. But they're looking to launch 10 to 15,000 satellites in each of these.
You see a lot of these different things going on. I mentioned some policy challenges along the way. But it has go you there a set of approvals. This is a curious part. We talked about the multi stakeholder model and how it works and there's nobody in charge of who gets to put LEO satellites where.
The telecommunications union tracks the geostationary satellites. They allocate slots because due to physics and other stuff, there's 1400 spots that you could have around the earth. So the IUT allocates that. But they don't allocate LEO orbits and slots. Instead, what happens is each national telecom regulator goes and allocates the altitudes and frequencies, et cetera, and then that all bubbles up to the ITU for kind of recordkeeping and coordination.
But it's an interesting aspect in the current world that all of these things are launching, but they're all under the kind of the national regulators are sort of agreeing with each other on what's going to happen. So we're all it's all a grand experiment.
Then those user terminals, they have to be approved for use within the country through typical consumer equipment kind of, you know, policies and pieces like that.
And then has to ground stations, you need to have permission go and connect down to a ground station to go back out to the Internet in some form.
All of these things need permitting and need licensing and all this. Which is why you've seen, for instance, One Web, which is another constellation that was now it's owned by a company in the EU, but they have they have their satellites up there already, but they're struggling to provide connectivity because they don't have the licenses for ground connectivity.
So there are people at these organizations whose job it is just to go into each country and try to negotiate with the regulator what kind of, you know, relationship, what will we be able to do.
And often in many countries the incumbent telecom companies are fighting this because they don't want the competition. And so they're pushing back and making it challenging for some of these systems to go on.
A couple other different things that are happening in this space is next. Okay. Let's see if we can it's not we're not advancing again. I think you have to have focus on that. Okay, yep.
Oh, okay. The other big thing, the challenges that's happening right now for the space is that there's only one company that is consistently launching satellites, and that is that's SpaceX launching rockets. So far this year, they've launched over 120 Falcon9 rockets that have had their satellites on them. The other competitors in this space, such as Ariane, they've only launched one, ULA launched one, Blue Origin has not launched a rocket yet.
So the challenge that this whole space has is that there's only one company getting the rockets up there. This is a challenge because these other providers have no way to get their satellites into space.
I'm going to talk a little bit about there's some resilience questions. There's a lot of spectrum kind of issues happening that are going on around and you'll see about WRC, the world radio telecommunications Congress, there's a lot of issues around spectrum sharing, what goes on.
There's also the ITU has some standards going on that they're looking at. There's a lot of different things happening within the UN space. And we also one of the questions we had here was about access during in regions of warfare or restrictions or things like this or shutdowns, technically, you go and turn on this kind of access anywhere in the world. Legally, you can't. There's treaties, et cetera, that all do this.
Now sometimes that can be that can you know, that can be ignored in some cases. Recently SpaceX or last year they had turned on the Internet access over Iran. Iran did not let them to do that, but they did anyway out of pressure from other organizations and pieces so people could be able to use it.
Well, that created Iran has filed complaints within the ITU and other spaces. But this is a space where it's where it's a challenge with that.
The other challenge is that if you're using these systems, they transmit. And so you can't just, you know, they can be seen by other people. They can be found. So it's not like just a passive observer that's actually doing that.
I think I want to wrap it up here with a final piece to say, there's a host of other things, there's space debris that's going on right now. There is there's environmental issues. We have real questions around all of these satellites have got a five year lifespan. And so then they burn up in the upper atmosphere. We're not quite fewer whether that's a good thing or not when you're at some point when we reach capacity we'll have maybe 40 or 50 of these burning up a day in the upper atmosphere.
I don't know, we don't know whether that's a good or bad thing or something. So all of these in the rocket launches associated with that.
There's a big impact on astronomy. These can block a lot of the different some of these systems are huge. You'll see a picture here, this is about the size of a in their new configuration, if you think of a basketball court, you know, that about half the size of that is what one of these satellites will be. So they're pretty huge. So they go and cover [?]
There's astronomy concerns, environmental concerns, space weather. There's a lot of different questions that we have around this. And the main piece is that these are things that we all have to figure out.
And I'll leave you with a final note, which is just to say that there's a lot of people who want to launch into LEO right now, and let me get to let me just give you this one chart here to end. There's, I think if I read this correctly, at the moment there are plans for about 555,000 satellites that people have suggested that they would launch, not all of those are going to happen, right? Okay. You've got a manufacture, you've got to launch them and do all that. But the point is there's a lot of people who want to get into this game, want to provide this access. There's all sorts of different countries playing in this, lots of different places.
So it's a big space and a lot's going on in that and I will leave you with one aspect which is to say that with the new U.S. administration and the proximity of Elon Musk to what's going on with the new administration, I'm expecting a lot of what they're looking at will be green lit, will be just they'll get the go ahead to go and do it. Which will mean SpaceX will probably launch it has plans for 30,000, possibly 40,000 satellites that will be going up and some other pieces. And much more of this direct to device.
So with that, I'm going to say thank you very much and we can stop sharing this screen and give over to the other the next presenter.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you very much, Dan, for this wonderful presentation. I'm wondering if there are any clarification questions either in the room or online. We can now allocate about a minute to anything that needs to be clarified.
>> DAN YORK: Are there any questions here that people have before we go on? I'm not seeing
>> ROXANA RADU: I'll just say that we can summarize all of this as it's all a grand experiment in your own words, it's something I'm going to use in the future. It's all a grand experiment, as you were saying there. There's huge potential for connectivity and innovation but a high concentration in the market, questions related to standards, to the danger of potentially weaponizing this technology, environmental concerns as well as concerns around issues we haven't explored fully yet from astronomy to bad behavior and so on and so forth.
And with about half a million LEO satellites in the making, we can absolutely see this rising up on the policy agenda.
So we'll now turn to an academic perspective
>> DAN YORK: One second, Roxanne, we do have a question in the room.
>> I'm from Italy. I have one question, I like your presentation but one thing, what will happen with this remote communities? Because if they will start to rely on this connectivity, let's say you know one day something bad happens and we get a bunch of space debris, all these things falls down, they might have less incentive to build and deploy to severely remote areas. I'm kind of wondering about your perspectives.
>> DAN YORK: Yes, that's one of our concerns is just that there you know, this is truly can be especially for the remote communities, this can be truly life changing. We've got any number of stories who have been able to go and participate in the modern world through this.
But yes, if we become very reliant on it and we don't have any other way to provide that connectivity, then if there is some kind of major issue with space debris or solar weather, space weather, we don't understand all of the aspects there, then it could become a situation where all of the sudden we're losing that.
So there's this warning that it's awesome, we can get great connectivity out of this, but we have to think about the fact that if it's the only path and one of the worst cases we could see if these the systems are currently being deployed. The biggest players are SpaceX, okay, with Star Link. They're the biggest one. Then you have the One Web constellations up there. And then Jeff Bezos with Amazon, they're going to have one that's the size of SpaceX, Star Link right now kind of thing, so you'll have a number of Western companies that are primarily controlling this space. If we wind up with a lot of terrestrial Internet service providers losing out on profitability, and we're all using space based Internet and it's in the control of a few corporations and maybe a couple governments, the EU just announced they're going to launch their they got a plan to put together some by 2030 or so.
So yeah, that is a concern we have. Now I mean, the reality is right now even if they're low orbit, you still get better speed and lower latency out of fibre. So if you can get fibre connections, you're going to get better speed and also (broken audio) that will be download and upload and a lower latency. So that's kind of your best case.
But there's also people in many parts of the world who found that their fibre infrastructure was wiped out in floods or other things like that and so some of those folks are saying, hey, maybe I should have, you know, something, Star Link for backup or something like that.
It's a question and global concern that as much as we embrace this for some things, we make sure we have other plans too.
Yes. Roxana, just tell me when I need to end the questions. .
>> I wanted to say yes and also the concern that if these are private companies that governments as they move towards E Government are building systems around and then somebody decides to turn off the Internet or they're also providing service to, like, a country that they're having, you know, issues with, like that's also very interesting.
>> DAN YORK: Yes. Who's in control of the Internet access.
Go ahead.
>> Okay. Mine is on ground stations. For this kind of system, one ground station can cover even a continent. What role will impact on Internet exchange points into the original intended need to monitor traffic?
>> DAN YORK: So yeah, good question. So one interesting aspect is that some of these ground stations are, in fact, being located near Internet exchange points because you are able to, you know, connect into all of those different networks. If you're not aware, an Internet exchange point is where they expect and share traffic. That's what an IXP is. It's a place where they join together often with shared pairing agreements, that kind of thing.
Sometimes they're located near data centers so you can have quick access to cloud computing or other things that are there.
But your second point comes in, this is where some governments are being you know, if it's going somewhere else, then who is in control of the monitoring or whatever is going on?
And so some governments who want to monitor or impose certain monitoring around that are reluctant to open up to these systems because they want to have control over what is what is seen in their country and that type of thing.
Now, we don't know what the licensing agreements are because that's all, you know, not available in the public. But there's certainly speculation that if I'm a LEO provider and operating in the country, the country may impose certain requirements on the use of spectrum that say you must have a ground station in my country or something like that.
You know, again, one challenge is, we don't know a lot of what happens. It's kind of a black box. We know that TCPI packets go into the Star Link network and they come out the other side. What happens in the middle and all that, we don't know. It's a lot of mystery because it's a private network, basically.
Yes.
>> Thank you for your presentation. It's very informative. First question is basically regarding the capacity, because we saw some of the deployment and it was limited to hundred something megabit per second. If we're assuming have a large island megabits per second will not be enough for them. Maybe if we increase [?] we increase capacity. That's the first question.
Second one is basically regarding the business model. How it will be in future. So do, for example, Star Link going to operate their services with local operators, mobile operators, or they will do it by their own, spreading all the Internet connectivity all over the world and I don't know what be happening in the future. Are we getting rid of mobile operators?
>> DAN YORK: So Roxanne I'll wrap up with that one there.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you.
>> DAN YORK: And the AV gentlemen, if we could stop sharing that screen that would be great so that the next person could come up with that.
So the two questions, one on the capacity, this is actually why Star Link SpaceX is in the process of trying to launch more satellites. Right now they have about 7,000 satellites up there right now. But they want grow to 42,000 satellites. That's their filings right now, largely so they can provide more capacity and higher bandwidth and all of that. They're also looking to bring some satellites closer to the earth down almost into the very low earth orbit area so they'll able to get lower latency and higher capacity.
And the third aspect is that when they get their starship, their large rocket to be able to launch things, they're launching what they call their V 3 satellites. They'll be larger and have a higher capacity and higher ability to go and do this.
So they're looking to dramatically grow that infrastructure.
As far as that business model one, that's one of the open questions, because for instance, Star Link has a very much direct to consumer model and that's been their model.
In some places they're working with mobile operators. And especially for the direct dial component that's there. Others are working with mobile retailers and others, so their business model is more wholesale working with that.
You know, like I said, it's a granted experiment, we don't know how this is all going to end. So it's going to be a lot of interesting times ahead of us.
Over to you, Roxana.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you so much. It's wonderful to see such vivid questions in the room already. We are going to address governance with our second speaker now, Dr. Berna Akcali Gur is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and the United Nations University institute on comparative regional integration studies within the digital governance cluster.
Berna, you have the floor.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Thank you, Roxana. You can see my PowerPoints and hear my voice? Yes, it's all well.
So good morning from London and thank you very much for moderating this panel and the formal introduction.
It's always a privilege to contribute to the IGF. Of course it's much better when it can be in person, but this year unfortunately I cannot be there due to conflicting personal commitments.
Nevertheless, I am glad to continue our discussion on satellite broadband from an Internet Governance perspective for IGF 2024 as well.
Satellite technology is not new. Test star 1 was the first active communication satellite and it was launched all the way back in 1962. Now, many more had been launched since then. However, with the emergence of mega constellations and broadband quality connectivity they offer, there's a renewed discussion on a wide range of issues relevant to this technology.
Now, some of the most urgent questions overlap with the contemporary debate on infrastructures and the current geo economic and geopolitical tensions.
Now one company, Star Link, the undisputed current leader in this domain, ignited these discussions. There isn't any strong competition yet, so most of what we discuss is based on its very short past.
So going back, okay. Now I have been working on a research project focused intensively on international law and satellite broadband since the beta testing days of Star Link, which was a bit longer which it was a bit longer than three years ago.
Now, many industry in those days were asking whether this time this project could be realized. Because in the past in the '90s other mega constellations were planned. They had promised to provide fibre like connectivity, and the project was abandoned only for commercial reasons.
Around the early 2000s, a lot of constellations projects had gone bankrupt, so the early [?] just decided not go ahead. And one of the main investors in this project may be of interest to the to the audience online, was a Saudi Arabian company.
Anyway, so it has been possible for us conduct this extensive and long project with our research partner, as Roxana mentioned, with the funding and support of the Internet Society Foundation.
So when Joanna joins us, maybe she can talk a bit more about what we have done so far.
But today I'll present my I will limit my presentation to only one aspect of this project, which is data governance. And it is one of the two issues where we see most questions on.
If you're wondering what the other question what the other group of questions is, it is the environmental risks of these constellations posed to the low earth orbit environment and the earth.
Just as I mentioned, it is a very important topic, but I will not talk about it today. But I have to say, I want to mention that we take that issue very seriously and we propose in our research that all decisions concerning societal, economic, and political benefits of this technology to be balanced against its adverse impact on environment, space safety, orbital sustainability, and Astrological impact.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website.
Now Dan gave a good explanation of mega constellations and the orbits, but I just want to say that the low earth orbit is a very valuable but limited natural resource. And why is it valuable? Because of its proximity and because it is, as I said, limited natural resource.
Now, it is utilized not only for by mega constellations, but other satellite services, including earth observation, and scientific research. The famous international space station is there.
So because of the ITU's first come first serve system and the mega constellations, the available space for the newcomers is shrinking fast. So to ensure that all countries that have the financial, technical and industrial capacity are rushing to put their constellations in this domain.
And so this competition is a big aspect of the mega constellation discussion.
Okay. Now, again, Dan's talk and mine overlap a little bit. But I would like to mention the legal definition of the mega constellations. Now, we know now that constellations consist of multiple or identical satellites through shared control for a common purpose.
And SpaceX has been very successful not only because of its launching capability, but also because of its mass manufacturing capabilities.
So in response to these exponential filings, they updated the regulations in 2019 and provided for the first time a legal definition for LEOs. This is the only international definition that exists, so I would like to read it.
A constellation applies to all non GSO satellite systems having more than one orbital plane where the mutual relative position of each orbital plane, any satellite within its plane is important. It means that all these satellites work together as one system.
Okay. So inspired us to do this project?
It was pure fascination and hope. We knew that infrastructure development stood in the way of closing the global digital divide within and between countries. In some regions there are was no business case to invest in infrastructures, because these regions were sparsely populate order located in inhospitable terrain.
So minimizing the need for infrastructure seemed a perfect solution in these areas. There's also the case for increasing the resilience of existing infrastructures in times of conflict or natural disaster. We have already seen a few examples of this in the last three and a half years.
So the first step for us was to see whether the domestic and international governance systems were conducive to the use of the constellations by the communities on the wrong side of the digital divide.
We have to remember that the developing world has a legitimate interest in broadband connectivity to stay abreast with the rapidly changing digital ecosystem. In addition to the enabling rule for all 17 sustainability rules, connectivity has sometimes been referred to as sustainable development called zero.
The agenda recently corroborated this claim indicating that 70% of all 119 sustainable development targets will benefit from connectivity.
We have broadband technology to serve the best interest of the developing world, we analysed whether the frameworks applicable to broadband service providers to see if they were fit for this new infrastructure and to see whether they addressed the problems that we associate with cross border Internet connectivity.
Now, what are these regulatory frameworks?
Any company offering satellite services must obtain landing rights from each jurisdiction in which they want to provide their services. So Star Link if Star Link intends to provides services in the United Kingdom, it has to go to the UK authorities.
These licenses and permissions can change from country to country and will depend on the business model of each service provider.
Does it want to provide services to consumers? Does it want to provide services to existing telecom providers? Does it want to install the ground station but nothing else? The range of licenses, the cost, and the requirements will change for each business model and each country.
And each state is free to decide this for themselves as long as these frameworks do not contradict international commitments they have undertaken. So the spectrum assignment should conform to the ITU regulations, whereas, importation of user terminals will be expected to conform to its commitments under its bilateral, regional, or international trade agreements.
Now, data privacy and data security are among these concerns. And a foreign service provider is expected to comply with the requirements of domestic authorities. In its broad sense, data security focuses on maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of data and protecting against threats like unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification and destruction.
Data privacy on the other hand, enwalls the ability to share data conceptually, with clear expectations about the context and scope of sharing.
Both concepts are fundamentally linked to privacy, personal data protection, and intellectual property. So they also relate to access as a right, as meaningful access requires secure access and safe navigation.
Now, they're perceived to have a cross border dimension. In response to the growing cyber risks and threats, countries worldwide have implemented domestic regulatory measures that govern digital data flaws, collection, storage processing often requiring data localization.
Now, global companies that control and access data must comply with these regulations. Satellite broadband service providers are not exempt from domestic requirements and must adhere to the regulations of the countries that they operate. I'm sharing the privacy page from Star Link's website.
As you can see, there are additional links for the EU, the UK, Mexico, and Brazil. It's recently been reported that they agreed with India's data localization requirements as well.
When you look at the availability map, these are not the only jurisdictions in which Star Link has been able to obtain landing rights. The others are either content with the general privacy commitments of the company and do not require jurisdiction specific commitments, or there are other arrangements in place.
Now this fragmentation is clearly difficult from a market access perspective, but it is clear that Star Link is willing to commit to complying with diverse legal requirements. These practices are likely to set the industry standards.
Though it seems very difficult in today's global dynamics, aligning regulatory approaches through regional or security based initiatives could have reduced regulatory burden on the emerging satellite broadband market and enhanced these measures [?]
But I do not see that happening soon in the next couple of years. Now, I will end my intervention by briefly talking about the data governance issue. Digital platforms, cloud services, data analysis there are is a PowerPoint that shows the satellite infrastructures placed in the overall infrastructures. I thought it could be informative so I'm sharing that as well.
And in that context, I want to talk about the digital governance. And now digital platforms, cloud services, data analysis and processing technology businesses have accumulated immense funds and influence, global influence, as a result of their global reach to data.
The concentration of these companies in a few states as well as resulting in global imbalance benefitting from data resources has raised concerns about the exploitation of countries that merely provide data and rely on others for digital technology, access, and services.
This concept is known as the digital colonialism and it's understood to expand the digital divide.
Now, the deployment of geo satellite broadband services is also evaluated in terms of the global data value chain and there are questions if they have the potential to worsen the problems labeled as digital colonialism, as I just mentioned.
Now, we argue in our research that if a common understanding of data governance in the context of data satellite broadband emerges, flow patterns of this technology will be essential. If satellite broadband technology is to contribute to sustainable development, authorities and users will expect their concerns to be addressed and debated openly.
We argue that this would be best achieved through a multi stakeholder process. And with this, I end my presentation. Please we can discuss I can take a few questions here, but also you can reach me through this email if you have further questions after this panel.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you so much, Berna, for the insightful presentation. I'm sure there are lots of questions. May I suggest that we keep all of that for the final discussion. And we go to our third speaker, Jane Coffin, is a presentation, a lot of you will be familiar with everything she has done in the past 30 years or so. She's a seasoned executive and Internet community expert who has been working at the center of connectivity and infrastructure development, policy and regulatory strategy and international development for many years now in different parts of the world. So we're very excited to hear your remarks, Jane, before we go into a conversation with everybody online and in the room.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you so much, Roxana, and thank you for everyone for this panel and it's very exciting to be with you.
I should say good afternoon, good morning, good evening, because I know people are coming in from around the world. I just have to give a quick disclaimer that I'm speaking in my personal capacity, not speaking on behalf of any entity and nothing I am going to say draws on nonpublic data. All the data is public or from my own experience.
I'm going to come what I'm going to say is more from the practical is as practical as you are hearing from Dan and Berna, but from a different perspective and it adds another dimension to the technical, the policy regulatory, but also the more practical policy regulatory perspective that needs to take place on the ground.
In a country when you're assessing something like looking at licensing or bringing the connectivity into your country, there's a huge dynamic here with respect to the holistic collaborative approach across the multi stakeholder ecosystem. And that can be done, of course, through mechanisms like governments working across different ministries and different entities, as Dan and Berna were both mentioning, there are the technical aspects. So you need the technical expertise. There's the legal, regulatory expertise that you would need. And if you don't have it, you can draw on others who have been through the process.
And you need that policy expertise, but also the practical how do you do something on the ground in a country, how do you get it done? Where do you start?
And I often like to say that when you start to have that practical focus, you really have to start to lay out a feasibility assessment and approach to how you would assess a LEO in your regulatory framework in your country and what would you do, where do you start, and then what the impact is. And Berna's mentioning environmental, Dan has spoken with technical. There's also the question of how are you going to integrate a new type of technology into your current infrastructure ecosystem? Where does it fit? Does it help with redundancy and resilience? What are the economic implications?
I think it's useful to lay this out in a way that you can find out more information about how that's been done before is to read the paper, of course, that Berna and Joanna put together. But there are other guides out there. There's one from more of a technical perspective that might be interesting. It breaks down satellites in general.
It's also taking a look at other countries' filings and proceedings. If they put out a notice of public rule make rulemaking or if they're just gathering data. Those are useful tools. Ministries use them all the time. UN agencies use them all the time. Regulators do. And I think what I would just say is that because we've heard this is a grand experiment from Dan, that's a great phrase, when you're looking at this from a regulatory perspective, there are hard rules which Berna mentioned earlier. But if you're looking that the from the more holistic cross government approach, you need to be flexible. If you think this will only take one proceeding, I think you could look at what other governments have done and it's iterative as we move into the system of having more of these mega constellations as Berna noted earlier in the ecosystem.
And I would quickly just mention from that overall landscape approach, when you're looking at what to do and those feasibility assessments, these have been run in other contexts for broadband mapping, for example. In other countries, there's lots of data on how to run a feasibility assessment or do a informants public inquiry to gather that data. And it's a normal tool, I want to stress again. And pulling in that information is extremely useful to you as whether you're a regulator, policymaker, or Civil Society just trying to figure out what across the multi stakeholder ecosystem is relevant to you.
It's also really important to think about your neighbors. If you're a landlocked developing country, I'll take a country that I visited several times, which is Kurdistan. There are border issues. There are issues of can I talk to and work with my partners nearby in order to see what's good regionally.
And looking across the region from an economic perspective and what's doable.
Research, taking a look, again, not only the paper that the colleagues have written, Berna and Joanna, but others out there. There's something called LEO con, which is an interesting group of people that have come together. There's the Internet engineering task force looking at standards and other organizations looking at standards like the ITU. You can broaden out your information and look at all of the resources cited in different publications, the paper in particular. They didn't ask me to promote the paper but I think very highly of the paper. And Dan has one, he didn't mention, a document he put together in the ITF which is also super helpful where you can find good global information working through the ITU development sector. There's questions looking through different types of connectivity on the ground, redundancy and resiliency and what that means for your country.
I mentioned the ITF, I'm sure there are others out there. You want to do a survey. I mentioned ITU. There's other governments out there that run these themselves. So take advantage of those processes to inform yourselves.
There was a conference recently there in Riyadh, connecting the world from the skies conference from the 25th to the 26th of November, so last month. There's good data coming out of that event, I believe, and lots of good experts there that participated globally.
From a collaborative governmental approach and Berna had mentioned this earlier, but I'll just say this from my personal experience, you need to know what the trade and customs authorities are thinking on customs duties, right? And I used to say this when I worked at the Internet Society that promoting the Internet is wonderful but keeping it in jail and customs is another thing if your equipment isn't certified.
Take advantage of other countries having gone through processes, look at what they've done, run your own inquiry process, because that will give you a lot of data and it will help you think about those cross governmental sort of vectors that you would want to create. It's more interconnection across government agencies versus networks, but that's also a good thing too.
Because you'll want to sync up and make sure other parts of your governmental system are working well together. Also from I'm not going to touch on some of the data sovereignty issues because Berna hit on those and that is not my expertise.
But I would just take a moment also to say that from a funding perspective, these are expensive systems. And so if you're looking at working regionally or in your country, there's some really good projects that have come to light. They have the digital infrastructure investment initiative. I know a lot of development financial institutions which are Islamic Development Bank, African Development Bank, American Development Bank and ICI, they're looking at how to fund more infrastructures, speaking of redundancy and resiliency, so not just one, but what does it take to look at funding a large ecosystem projects.
And it's worth noting that you have a role to play on the ground when it comes to the feasibility assessments itself. What can the country bear if it's a loaner agreement and what can you take in.
And also perception of risk. Berna talked about digital colonialization. There's the importance of debunking or taking apart the concept of risk when you're looking at investment. This was something I was looking at in a different life, different job. But you've the good it take a look at what that means from your own perspective when you're talking to investors and you have to have a lot of data. That is yet another reason looking at the research that's out there, doing your own research and educating yourself, but looking at the proceedings of other governments so you can see the different resources they've used in order to create a better, more informed process in your country.
I'm going to stop there so we can take other questions, but I wanted to just say I'm coming up as a practical approach, but it's a cumulative practical approach. If you look at how connectivity and from a policy and regulatory perspective, successful programs look at that technical, economic, the legal policy, and the practical.
And we can't forecast what all of what's going to happen, but you can get very well informed and draw upon other data that you can bring into your own policy and regulatory ecosystem.
Thank you very much. Back to you, Roxana, for questions from the audience.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you, Jane, for the know how but also the know when and know with whom because these are equally important questions.
And as Berna also outlined before, there are so many different patterns that can be explored in this, so many different country experiences, so many different paths that we might be able to engage with. And it has on the one hand regulatory, legal implications.
But you brought in the question of risk, and there are financial risks, investment risks, assessment risks that you can do on the ground.
But something that's been on my mind is the risk of cybersecurity. What do you do with the risk of cyberattacks and going beyond just establishing that baseline of sustainable funding and sustainable connectivity, what happens when there are disruptions to that.
And I think we might just have into the room now just the right person to talk about this very briefly. Joanna has been able to join us. Her name was mentioned since the beginning, she's a convener of this session, but also cowrote a number of papers with Berna on on the topic. She teaches international law, media law at a university in Poland.
Joanna, are you able to jump in? We'll see if she can be unmuted. We might need some technical assistance. Now we have her, yeah. I see that she was able to unmute.
>> JOANNA: I have a mic but the camera has not been disabled. I see we have a few questions coming from the audience, which is amazing. I'm more than happy to use the camera once it's enabled.
Thank you so much for all the presentation and I apologize from not being able to join you from the beginning.
Thank you, Roxana, for your skilled leadership.
I always get very excited when cybersecurity is mentioned, also with
>> DAN YORK: Joanna.
>> JOANNA: Yes.
>> DAN YORK: You can turn on your camera.
>> JOANNA: To intervene briefly, I'm mindful the time. Thank you, Dan, thank you very much for your on site assistance.
The cybersecurity, I believe, is the flip side of everything that Berna kindly, skillfully presented. We're looking at data, data in Europe primarily moons personal data and it means privacy, it means GDPR compliance that Berna was kind to discuss in detail.
But the flip side of data governance is cybersecurity. So I feel like it might make sense to put it on the table before we enter the Q&A session. Roxana rightfully highlights risk assessment. That seems to be the consensus among states.
We focus on risk assessments, we build them into logistical frameworks like DNS and in Europe that includes satellite connectivity. But there's so much more to be said about cybersecurity. It is the question of investment, what equipment do we invest in. The conversation Berna and I have been having around LEOs started with 5G. Are there lessons with 5G that we could apply.
It seems as 5G caught Europe but not only Europe a little bit by surprise. We knew we will to have it but we had little policy with regards to how we select the providers. It seems these lessons are now being repeated with LEOs. We know we want them, it's just a question of who is going to provide them.
There's heavy funding both in Europe just the latest headlines indicate the budget's allocated to Irish square and Europe is pushing hard towards this was just mentioned by Jane, digital sovereignty, we call it technological autonomy here. We would like to have our own LEOs. And the record that was kindly mentioned, we would think about them as our LEOs, so it is could be controlled. And the data access is for those who manage them.
But if you look at the market, they're bound by national laws on data access. This could be the national cybersecurity policy that obliges service providers to store data locally and enables government to have a peek into those databases. Particularly when developing countries are thinking about using LEOs, these are definitely policy considerations to be included.
And one thing that I believe is coming to the foreground of these discussions is also quantum computing. It seems as China is investing heavily into the quantum to make sure that the provisional LEO services is more efficient. This might be the cutting edge of innovation that will be added to the LEO services that will follow. They are part of the one road initiative. So we might see discussion around LEOs sustainability, and data access have a very strong cybersecurity component.
Mindful of the time, noting the questions already from the floor, thank you again so much, Roxana, for your skillful leadership. Let me know if I can assist with the Q&A, but I'm more than happy to follow your lead here but thank you everyone for contributing and joining the session.
Thank you.
>> ROXANA RADU: Absolutely. I think we'll move right into the questions part. So let's go to the room and then if you could pass around the microphone so we can hear online. But let's start a conversation.
Please feel free to also put your hands up online so we can see the questions coming in.
>> DAN YORK: Is there a question here? Okay, yeah.
>> Yeah, hello, everyone. I'm the Internet Society ambassador this year.
So I think just yesterday Europe has announced its Iris program and they plan to invest 10.5 billion euros into launching their own satellites.
But they will be, like, 290 of them in comparison to 7,000 that Elon Musk has and China has like thousands of them. And this program will it is like aimed at six years, so this amount of satellites, do they really able to compete with the private sector? And with the agency they have to create the regulations and, like, to prevent the private companies to be presented in Europe. Do you think that the sphere, it can be regulated that much that private company will be kind of limited from being presented in Europe, for example?
Yeah, and who do you think has more potential to be in this space forward, I would say? Private companies or governments at the end.
>> DAN YORK: Who wants to take that?
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: Should I say a few words or Joanna?
>> ROXANA RADU: Go ahead, Berna, go ahead.
>> BERNA AKCALI GUR: I'll say awe few words and maybe Joanna would like to add another point.
The IS2 project started as the motivation for the IS2 project was to also have a space based connectivity for the working governments. But then when we saw the regulation proposed at the commission, they also talked the regulation also talks about the competitiveness in the global commercial the global market of the European Union companies.
And so you mentioned how does European Union choose these companies that it will work with. There's a strong security component as to how these companies are selected. So for example, one European company, one French company, it became a shareholder in One Web, which is a UK India venture. So the European Union was skeptical as to whether it should work with that company because it compromised they thought they compromised as to the security requirement.
So when you look at the U.S., there's a I'm not an expert in U.S. law, but from what I've been reading, the U.S. also had very strong security measures as to as to its space. So there are import jurisdictions, export jurisdictions, and there's a lot of secrecy around Star Link's technology and a lot of secrecy around any type of space technology.
So if you this is a competitive market, but the competitive market is very much divided between along the borders of the states. And so I think the implication of this would be the states that lack the technology, that lack the expertise would be unfortunately left behind or they would remain on the users side of the new technology. But there may be different opinions on this, but this is what I've been observing through our research.
>> JOANNA: If I may two cents. I would strongly agree I think there's analogy to be drawn between this sector of the market and the discussion we had around platforms where there was a question around whether we can regulate companies. Europe takes this challenge, we call it whole regulation. So we invite platforms to the table, we have codes of conduct, you could call it social responsibility of business, but it's a little bit more than that.
You could compare it to that scenario, but I think as Berna rightfully mentioned, the government will likely want to have the upper hand on this, particularly because of the cybersecurity component or cybersecurity angle.
In Europe through regulation, it's an IS2, but it's so much more. But if you look at China which will likely have a good offer particularly for other countries, the government is also doing it. As much as I like the approach building Internet related policies, I think the governments might want to have the final say here.
And one component which I have not heard yet mentioned but I'm just going to bring back to the discussion is multi stakeholderism. It seems like we have had this platform like the IGF developed to make those decisions because cybersecurity concerns. I don't think there's a multi stakeholder platform for the specific component of infrastructure that is being decided upon right now.
So that is an interesting path to follow. I think it just complements your question how should we make these decisions. Is the multi stakeholder model appropriate? Is there a place for multi stakeholders who time into the debate around LEOs or will it indeed be handled exclusively by government.
And if not even international law, but probably more national law with Europe at the exception with its strong EU framework. Thank you so much.
>> DAN YORK: I think there's also an interesting element with the IS2 the announcement that was there. It will be interesting to see what the business model is and what they do. Their satellites in the plan announced yesterday are not going to be able are not going to launch until 2030. You know, or the first parts of that.
Now, there's a bunch of open questions because the winning consortium included two companies, the One Web constellation and SES which has its own constellation in the medium earth orbit and has some geo satellites and is in the process of purchasing intel sat that also has a number of geo satellites.
It's a consortium of companies that already operate in there. There's a lot of unknowns as to what they'll use. Can they use some of the One Web satellites to get this connectivity up quickly? I don't know. It will be interesting to see where it goes because it will take them at least through 2030, another five years, and in that time you're going to have Star Link to continue to launch satellite after satellite. So there will be a lot of competition there.
On the other hand, as you mentioned, this is a lot do with European security and European sovereignty of control of this. So it may that be a lot of business model is fund through the government entities and the other folks who are using it in some form.
So we'll have to see. I think there's a lot of questions still to be known. I mean, I welcome more competitors in the space.
I think part of what we've seen that's made the Internet so successful over the 30 years is there's a lot of network and competition in there. I would welcome this in the space based space as well. Love to see.
I don't have any other questions in the room. Oh, I have one more but I also know you do have somebody online if you want
>> ROXANA RADU: Yeah, maybe we can go to the question in the room or ask for technical assistance to unmute the participant on line. That way we get the continuing question and we address them together.
>> DAN YORK: Okay. I'll give this to you here.
>> Hello, everyone. Okay. Hello, everyone. First of all, thank you very much for this panel. My name is Alan and I'm actually from the Brazilian space agency. I've been following up this discussions. I'm a technical adviser there of international cooperation. I've been participating on some UN forums as well. And maybe my point of speech here is just an intervention to say that I'm as a researcher, I totally agree we need a multi stakeholder platform to discuss all of these points.
From a government perspective, however, we have just approved our new bill in Brazil that is addressing some concerns in space sustainability. This is a point that end to end in the middle of a dilemma. How can we ensure universality of connectivity and make sure that we're not polluting our atmosphere and following guidelines that are addressing sustainability issues.
And this is a concern that we have there in Brazil and our policy that will be regulating these matters is still under development. But it's nice to see that forums like this, the IGF, are maybe the main arena that we must have to discuss all that. And that's it. Thank you very much for this panel and, yes.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you so much. I said we're going to couple two questions, so we have one more that will come from the online space and we have the advocate who can unmute now.
>> DAN YORK: Roxana, I was just informed we're not unmuting remote speakers. They are to type their questions in the chat and then we can read them from there.
>> ROXANA RADU: We will do that. Thank you very much. That was not clear from the beginning.
We do have another question that came in the chat. And this time it's from India, a Professor, is asking the following: The Internet where much of the action is not felt remains invisible. Is there any methods to make one conscious of potential risks I guess at the intersection of privacy and cybersecurity from what we can't really see and touch as such?
Who would like to address any of the two questions?
>> JOANNA: I'm glad to start us off, letting our panelist think. Thank you so much. First I think it was more of a comment from the Brazilian participant than a question, but I do strongly feel about the point you were making, sir, in terms of this being the time to have the discussions and having them in the multi stakeholder format as the IGF, also having them at the ITU. But I think the point of this specific session, the idea that has guided us in this work is to raise awareness also in line with the individual users of the Internet.
Usually particularly the younger generation does not really care where the Internet comes from, they just kind of want it quick and efficient. This might be also the default thinking of some government.
So I strongly identify with your point highlighting the need to have these informed discussions now before the space is overpolluted or polluted as a result of the new space race that we are witnessing.
And with regards to the question from Nepal, I'm going back to the multi stakeholder model again. I see some of our ICANN colleagues in the room and in the chat, may be the answer to make this efficient is to go back to the one world one Internet motto that Dan mentioned and go back to the technical community to make sure that they handle all the data according to the same principles and standards.
I don't think I have a good answer legally other than saying, well, you know, Europe solved it with GDPR. We invented this brilliant piece of legislation that's implemented worldwide and protects data particularly of individual end users. But I know that might be a statement that resonates very well in Europe and not so well outside of the EU.
That would be my immediate response. I'm more than happy to hear what my co panelist and distinguished moderator have to add. Thank you.
>> ROXANA RADU: We just received a question from an advocate. Can I ask it now and we collect other thoughts on the other questions we received. This is a question that refers to Africa. What are the implications of this development for Africa? What will be the criteria for African service providers to participate in the platform? Is this not further disintegrating the Internet to the deep rural that are still unconnected?
>> JANE COFFIN: I would put out there are quite a few African governments that have taken a look and licensed certain LEO constellation service. Nigeria being one of them, Rwanda, Kenya, and so on. And there's there's data out there where you can find that information.
But there's a great opportunity with, as I had mentioned earlier, taking a feasibility assessment across countries and regions. You could even work through the African union or telecom union, data net society, association for progressive communications, they're all looking at connectivity on the ground and there are a lot of other multi stakeholder organizations, as Joanna has mentioned, from the Civil Society and other sides. They're very interested in connectivity in general.
In particular for certain countries that have geographic challenges, there are quite a few. If you think the DRC or you're looking being at a desert country or Algeria, there's lots of opportunity for looking at how to bring in more redundancy and resiliency in your infrastructure. So it would be a potential mix of different connectivity, because you don't want single points of failure.
I would highlight that many African countries, I'm on the board of a nonprofit called the African Internet exchange association. Many countries have Internet exchange points in Africa across the in the islands and across the entire continent. Those are very important parts of Internet infrastructure that can connect up with, say, LEO systems or fibre.
But I would just say there's lots out there, there are a lot of people looking at this and the other governments that have licensed the LEO constellations that are currently active would have information.
And I would strongly promote the notice of inquiry approach from a governmental or regional perspective to pull in more data on any of the questions that have been asked, but in particular on the importance of infrastructure regulatory policy sort of confluence and multi stakeholder.
>> DAN YORK: Yeah, I was just going to say that to the question around Africa, I mean, right now if you look at the map right now for deployments, Africa is still unconnected. It's the part that it's not available. And that has a lot do with that whole regulatory the licensing of spectrum that mentioned at the beginning. They have to go through all of that to get it licensed, the ground stations, the consumer equipment, the spectrum allocations, the uplink and downlink. It's a lot of work to get it licensed for each country. So that's a lot of the work that they're doing. And so I think if somebody wants to see what's the opportunity for telecom operators in there, part of it is working with the country to regulators to see what can be done to get the licensing accelerated.
And then I do think this whole direct to dial is a whole new area, and I would expect to see that know the only SpaceX, but also AST space mobile and some of the others will be looking to partner with telecom companies to give them this added access.
So that creates a whole new layer of interesting policies and things that have to be thought through. But that would be one opportunity as that all comes online.
Roxana, we did get a message here that we do need to wrap up in this session, so we do need to go to some sort of
>> ROXANA RADU: I see a few more questions coming in online, but I think this will be for follow up question and I'd hand over to Joanna just for the wrap up and conclusion.
>> JOANNA: Thank you very much, Roxana. I believe that the last two interventions are a great wrap up to this session.
I'm thankful to all the participants online in the room, particularly our panelists and moderator for gathering around this roundtable in a multi stakeholder format sharing their expertise. I feel like we have a lot of potential capacity in the room.
The last messages focuses on Africa and the potential it brings to the table with regards to connectivity are the perfect takeaway message in terms of the capacity being there, being built. I'm certain I speak on behalf of all of us, the questions can be directly addressed to any of the panelists. Do feel free to reach out, all the contact information is on the IGF website. We're easily reachable online and offline.
So thank you very much for being a part of this discussion. We've designed this session as a conversation. We would like for this to be carried on among different stakeholders, so please treat this as an invitation to a conversation to be carried on. As Jane indicated, having an assessment of regulatory capacity in a country in a region, the potential of technologies with regards to data, I'm thrilled we have Roxana with us who is an expert on cybersecurity. So all the aspects that were just merely flagged during this session are conversation starters.
So my message would be to invite everyone to keep this conversation going in a multi stakeholder format, but also on the ground locally with your governments, with your regulators, and with Civil Society.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to the panelist and to our moderator. Enjoy the IGF and let's keep in touch. It's a wrap. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you very much.
>> DAN YORK: Thank you.