APrIGF Document Platform

Some issues raised at Townhall:
– Digital citizenship and importance of digital literacy
– Accountability and transparency of (big) platforms, governments, and stakeholders
– Role of governments and private sector (such as media) in the spread of misinformation and erosion of online trust
– Collaboration and cooperation in cybersecurity “all hands on deck”

Internet being ubiquitous how much online privacy does an individual have? Do we have any latest tools or security techniques that enhances the safety of online transactions and that improves our privacy on the cyber space?

Transparency is important to different stakeholders. Users know how service providers use our data. People know how government use the data and participate in policy making procedures.
For example, we talked about smart city development yesterday. But some people don’t know the schedule and worry about the surveillance with CCTV everywhere and harm to privacy.

Encryption technic help to protection privacy to every internet users. Government has the responsibility to take care of safety to every people. Citizens and commercial services can to something to limit the government behavior, ask to the underline to government behavior.

Transparency Report help enterprise to protect commercial services themselves. Companies may record the requests from government and make those numbers public.

The link is an example from Google’s transparency report.

We can’t leave anyone behind. We must think and work together, articulating the academy with the state, communities and private companies, to truly democratize access to ICT, including the empowerment of people in the safe, productive and meaningful use of technology.

When filling the digital gap and making Internet available to all regardless of socio-economic status, gender and age. Pointing out on the age factor is digital inclusion applicable for all ages? will this not have a greater impact on the children, kindly suggest more on this.

What are the roles of all stakeholders in access provision and inclusion, and the provision of education and training for information literacy and digital literacy, including the responsible exercise of these skills with respect for other people? 3 recommendations that should be implemented by Internews to help the community especially.
First of all is to go back to basics. We might have the understanding that we are going to go into communities with the power and privilege we have compared to the community that we are going to serve. However, we should view anything that we are going to do with the community as a learning process for both parties. Listen first to their information and the knowledge they know so far. Assessment within the community to adapt on what they want and what they need. Only then education and awareness take place to disseminate the knowledge.

Secondly, we should hold on to the principle of do no harm in a more practical way. When talking about information it can be accessed online and offline. For the online platform, the way we engage with the community should be based on their understanding and we do not want to open can of worms where we educate them on how to get the information but not how to control themselves to impart the knowledge properly. Either urban or rural communities, they are all prone to the danger of the internet and false news. This is where we should be careful on what we go through with them as at the end we could not just leave them without properly briefing them on the online danger too.

Thirdly, no one is left behind. We tend to assume that rural communities have a lack of access for information. However, there are reports of those educated and also professionals that fell into scams and did not know properly on how to differentiate the quality and originality of the information. This could cause more harm in the society and community. The outreach of the programme should comprise the rural, urban poor and community organizers that will help the community in exercising their knowledge and rights and in a way enhance their literacy.

In addition to providing access to the internet to more people, we also need to make sure that the internet provides a safe space for minority groups and vulnerable communities. There are at least two issues when it comes to the internet: the monolingualism of it and the lack of content that provides affirmations for minorities and marginalized communities. Therefore, I believe it is important to also think of how we can empower minorities and marginalized communities to populate the internet with native contents by and for the community and to build a safe space so they can not only use, but also thrive on the internet.

Fake news is a big concern during COVID-19, it is understandable for some social media platform to establish some mechanism to filter out “inaccurate” information with some fact-checking system. With the “831 Incident in Hong Kong” example raised during the Townhall session on 30 September 2020, I believe our community should pay more attention on how such enterprises are reviewing their content and how they are influenced by the government bodies of different countries. As it is another form of violation of Human Rights to filter out factually accurate content with inaccurate conclusions. This is definitely a potential risk behind the entire fact-checking mechanism, as people may abuse the system by spreading false information online on purpose to limit the dissemination of true and accurate information in any channels with a similar mechanism for whatever reason.

Digital divide, gender disparity are amongst some of the major barriers of inclusion. However, it may need intervention at many different levels as it is a problem with multiple facts. It needs in-depth research to find out the factors leading to the digital divide. There could be more than what meets the eye. The issues of the South Pacific Islands may be different than those of the rest of the regions int the world.

Also good to comtemplate- what do we perceive as the ideal ecosystem for internet, is there a model country/region to benchmark with?

The 3rd policy question should be narrowed down a little bit as it may create confusion such as the role of government in the protection of human rights online based on what? the regulations? Please point out a context you want to refer to, since I believe that there are various cases that involve the governments with different measures. For example, there is a legitimacy of surveillance under certain conditions (proportionality, necessity, etc).

Will be good to mention the need to apply business and human rights standards to tech companies – recognising the impact these companies have on the rights and lives of individuals

Some of the pressing concerns for the Pacific in terms of 5g-
– Do we have as much internet penetration in the South Pacific Countries, Do we have enough phones/PCs, – Are our people IT/Digital literate, Can our ISP’s provide such amounts of bandwidth,

With the possibility of the splinternet there should be a call for island nations (governments) to invest in submarine cable infrastructure and not just leave it to the private sector. To a certain extent this improves the backhaul and the bandwidth capacity and significantly contributes to inclusion to less developeed island (provinces) but also enables redundancies to other adjacent nations making bilateral, multilateral nations better.

With the increased usage of ICT, there will be a growing concern for human-centric designs. additionally, ethical issues need to be explored and addressed. It may help to advocate for “digital rights”, and have it advocated to every citizen, especially since we are moving towards deploying citizen-centric
e-services

Once IT/Digital literacy becomes recognized as a “right”, then a framework can be developed for the Pacific,on how to achieve such literacy

We know the pandemic forces some enterprises to do digital transformation. People have to work from home and some people lost their job. Hope the ICT technology may help the people to get chance to have new job.

The other thing is Google and Apple collaborate together to provide the social distance map to warning. Hope that can protect the privacy to everyone.

Geopolitics really affects the internet development. The content on the internet is cross border, some government govern the internet with their own perspective. Government may prohibit some internet services, content, do censorship to social network platform.
It may also relate to the tax. Users consume the services in one country but the pay in the other country, the services or goods were delivered in another country. That relates the tariff or consumer tax in different countries.

Some issues to help frame global IGF Environmental Theme:
a) incentives for sharing data by public and private sectors as digital public goods
b) environmental data governance
c) collaborative environmental analytics (citizen science and open datasets)
d) AI-algorithm transparency for data integration and analytics for digital public goods
e) dealing with misinformation and fake news about the environment
f) e-waste and product lifecycle
g) early warning systems, disaster recovery and emergency response, specially in the Pacific