Naveen Tandon: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of my Co-Chair, Shyam, and myself, Naveen Tandon, we would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you for the inaugural session of the Public Policy Advisory Committee.

APPLAUSE

It is truly important and truly unique and historical, and from today onwards it will be an important forum to discuss various issues related to the Internet and also to provide a platform to have a multistakeholder discussion, which is quite vital in terms of international cooperation and partnerships for the growth of the Internet.

The Internet today, as we see, is a very important tool and, on a global scale, essential for the growth of the infrastructure, which for the growth of commerce, mankind and economy.

Through the session -- as I said, this is the first session -- we will certainly continue to have more engagement of the community; what will be discussed is how it will function and what will be the manner in which recommendations move out. It will truly be governed by the multistakeholders, representing

government, private sector, academia, civil society, technical community and everybody.

Our endeavour, as Chair of this session, will be that more people will come forward to share the best practices and what are the issues they would like APNIC to take up, so that it will emerge as an important body on public policy. Apart from being a very important body in terms of numbering technical resources, we want APNIC to come up to be a more important and forceful body to discuss public policy of running the Internet.

It is important that, as an international organization, we should certainly build an environment in which all of us, as the stakeholders, can play an important role. Important is the fact that because there are a lot of talks going on, which are very important, that we should look at how the Internet can be transformed to equinet.

With this background, I will just give a small presentation. For today's agenda for the session we have one and a half hours. Given the fact that we have one and a half hours, it is important that, despite being the inaugural session, we have to discuss the administrative and organisational issues pertaining to how the committee will be run, the structure, the periodicity of meetings. It is important for us to

efficiently utilize, in terms of what kind of business is transacted in the meeting.

We have a full packed agenda lined up for you today. We will have a discussion on the structure, periodicity and functioning of the committee, then we would like to have a discussion on how the community members would like -- which issues to take up.

We have three important presentations lined up, from Dean Pemberton, principal consultant, InternetNZ; Mr RM Agarwal, DDG NT DOT; and Mr Manoj Misra. We will end up with having a five-minute discussion on taking stock and the way forward, followed by a vote of thanks.

The journey so far: the proposal was first moved by Mr Rajesh Chharia. This committee was formed at APNIC 30 in August 2010, Gold Coast, Australia. The original charter was to discuss specific proposals for including government in the matters of Internet policy as it pertains to respective economies. Later on, given the interest and feedback from the community members, this was transformed into a multistakeholder group called the Public Policy Advisory Committee.

The discussion continues on the working group which was formed. To date we have close to 67 members and we hope the number will increase in times to come.

The discussions have been through online mode,

face-to-face discussions, for which a report was submitted at APNIC 31 Hong Kong, and finally a face-to-face meeting which led to the formation of this committee.

Pursuant to that there was a survey conducted and we are thankful to the community which has shown much interest in forming this committee.

A report was submitted; there was consensus which was achieved in the community to constitute this Public Policy Advisory Committee at APNIC.

We gave the recommendations to the Executive Council for forming this committee and are thankful to APNIC especially for providing an assurance to provide the requisite support for the next three years for holding the Public Policy Advisory Committee meetings.

In summary, Public Policy Advisory Committee at APNIC seems to have a multistakeholder formal body comprising of government, industry representatives, academic and technical people. It is a framework which intends to institutionalize the private policy engagement within APNIC on matters relating to public policy in Internet.

PPAC's role will be to discuss in APNIC on whatever issues affect the region on which there is a need to provide a fillip to the policy framework on how best to

grow the Internet.

It will certainly work to provide and have a discussion platform and proactively advise APNIC on matters which affect the region.

Whatever will be discussed, we will certainly have a report which will be submitted to the AMM at the end of the session.

To start the agenda, I would like to invite Mr Rajesh Chharia, who was the proposer of this committee, to share his thoughts and suggest a structure in terms of how the committee intends to run. Thank you.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): Thank you, Naveen and Shyam. Good morning to all.

Good things always start with a hurdle, and the hurdles link togetherness among communities.

Here, during this proposal, when I moved during the Gold Coast meeting, the same thing happens, but now finally it got approved by the community again.

On behalf of my community, ISP Association of India, and NIXI, National Internet Exchange of India, I have moved three proposals which have got approved by the APNIC committee till date. The first proposal was in Seoul, for revising the pool size from /21 to /22. I think that benefits all of us, not large benefits, but

small ones, the IPv4 exhaustion delayed a little bit.

The second most important proposal was NIR for India, and that too has been approved by the community. Now the name IRINN, already launched in December, and till date around 71 affiliates -- we call members affiliates over here -- are using this.

Thanks to APNIC EC Chair, Mr Akinori Maemura, APNIC EC, and special thanks to APNIC DG, Mr Paul Wilson, and the APNIC team for awarding this to our country during APRICOT, which we hosted last year, February, in New Delhi. But without the help and support of our Indian community, ISPAI and NIXI team, we would not be called this NIR.

I give special thanks to Mr N Ravi Shankar, our seasoned government bureaucrat; Mr Rajesh Agarwal, now he is the Secretary in Maharashtra Government; Dr Govind, CEO NIXI; and one of my close friends, Mr Naresh Ajwani, who everybody knows. I would say, please cheers to all of them.

The third proposal, I moved as a GAC, Government Advisory Committee, but a long discussion changed the name to PPAC; a very good name.

It was moved at the Gold Coast meeting and now I can assure you that we will experience a lot of benefits when different committee members from different

communities -- government, economy and private players -- will sit together and will share ideas and applicable rules to their economies together.

In India, the Government of India has invested around US$4 billion to US$5 billion for a unique NOFN and BBNL project with the project target of 175 million by the end of 2017 and 600 million by 2020, with the main objective of bridging the digital divide between rural and urban.

In India, around 65 per cent of the population belongs to rural, and they require hand-holding for using different broadband applications on computers and other devices. This hand-holding is the word given to me by Naresh Ajwani.

As you all know, India is the biggest democratic country in the world, where government and private players are the stakeholders in telecommunications. Initially, the representation into APNIC and different international events was very minimal from the private as well as from the government side. But now, after the growing success of 800 million of mobile connectivity and now the new targets of growth of 600 million by 2020, our priority has changed, and now it requires a lot of awareness and policy discussions as per the large target. And you can see the delegation size of our

industry from India, including government, is increasing day by day.

The committee, the PPAC: through this committee we will be finding a lot of ideas, needs and prevailing rules and regulations of different economies. Their priorities are different, their needs are different, but we will sit together and will understand the issues of each of them. I can assure you, as in India, we have a tradition of joint family where we sit together and decide on important issues; the same way at the PPAC committee also we will do the same thing.

We hope that into the PPAC committee all the economies will get full honour and full opportunity to put their ideas, and accordingly we will propose these discussions to APNIC for taking this matter forward. Hence, I suggest that government representatives of all economies must be into the PPAC, along with the private players and communities.

After a few years of our coming generations, who are the actual users of the broadband Internet, I hope they will thank us for creating a good and strong foundation for them, where the multistakeholder discussions and deliberations will be there.

Thanks to all of you once again, and hope for the good and fruitful discussions during this PPAC inaugural

meeting. As I have already suggested, the structure should be of the government of all economies and the private players and the community. Let's discuss further how to format this committee so that we will be able to get a very great thing from this committee. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Rajesh for sharing your thoughts.

We will now move to the next agenda item, which is on having an interactive session on what should be the structure, functioning and periodicity of holding meetings.

When we formulated the agenda we felt it is important for us to share a draft with the community members because we truly want the community -- the ideas, suggestions should totally flow from the community, because that will certainly make this committee work very efficiently.

We have got two comments from our members, our member community: one, we got a comment from the EC Chair, Mr Akinori-san, and Mr Naresh Ajwani NRO NC. Can I request Akinori-san to kindly share his thoughts on how he would like the committee to function, and especially some thoughts he has in terms of structuring.

I have seen the emails and he commented it should be more discussion, less of decisions and we should all work in a multistakeholder dialogue.

Akinori Maemura: Thank you very much. I am Akinori Maemura, executive of the APNIC Council. I am very surprised; this is very sudden for me to have some speech on this regard.

The Executive Council, after the discussion for a not short period, we determined to facilitate the PPAC for further discussion in every APNIC Meeting. It is already sent to the government mailing list as our proposal, that PPAC will have one session in every APNIC Conference and APRICOT for the coming three years, for the presumed period for the feedback.

This is for us to encourage the PPAC to have the fruitful discussions among the community, for the various public policy affairs for sustaining the Internet by our community.

We suggested that the discussion should be driven as the manner which the Internet Governance Forum is taking for these recent several years, which is non-binding, but a very good place for the dialogue among the multistakeholders, including the government and the civil society and the technical community, like that.

So that will be a really good opportunity for the

APNIC community to consider that topic, and I really appreciate the current chairmanship's initiative to do this and I encourage you for quite active discussion for this. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Akinori-san, for your comments.

I now invite Mr Naresh Ajwani to share his thoughts. The suggestion which came from him was to have an outreach program for engagement of government, which is an important stakeholder. I would request Naresh to come and share his thoughts.

Naresh Ajwani: Thank you, Chair.

All inclusiveness is the way forward, echoed by Fadi also yesterday.

How can we ensure that every stakeholder, irrespective of being minority or marginalized or late in his reaction or engagement, how can we see that the particular stakeholder is also part of decision-making? How can we see 52 economies of the Asia Pacific are equally represented? How can we ensure that every stakeholder gets due representation in decision-making?

It goes without saying, until the time we will not engage the most representative of cross-country spectrum stakeholders, the governments, into this kind of meeting, we will be always running a half-cherished

dream of all inclusiveness.

Governments, especially democratic governments, the ones who represent cross-country spectrum, need to be part of decision-making which can have an influence on many of the issues related to safety, security of the country, and especially the empowerment of the country.

What we do here is not just a technical policy; we also do here the impact of these technical policies which can lead to nothing else but empowerment, especially to the marginalized community.

In my humble submission, I would request each and every member out here to go for an outreach program or get supported by bodies, like APNIC and ICANN, to ensure that government participation here is the maximum. Our every decision, discussion, has the biggest implication on their approaches in their respective countries.

The advice has come that we need to stop a particular link, whether technically feasible or not, has to be explained, has to be deliberated with them, and it's high time we have this wake-up call, and not just limit this discussion to only engineers as a way of life, saying that they only have the right to know about the policies.

It's high time we came out and engaged other important stakeholders to see that APNIC becomes

a widely respected body across nations, across RIRs, as an example. The initiative we have taken should not be stopped as just turning this into this kind of committee and not go for programs where we really engage government in a true manner.

I request all of you to apply desired pressure on APNIC so they invest money to see that due representation is here, and every time, for any such decision. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Naresh, for your thoughts.

I would now like the community member participants here to share their thoughts on the manner in which the committee is supposed to run. We heard Akinori-san and Naresh on what kind of inclusiveness and thought processes on making the committee a success. So I would like to invite members who want to share their thoughts and perspectives.

At the same time, we certainly need to ensure gender balance. We encourage women who play an important role in ICT, and we have sessions separately lined up in APNIC, also to come forward and share thoughts.

Dean Pemberton: I would like to give some feedback on the structure.

Naveen Tandon: I would request member participants to

announce your name and organization.

Dean Pemberton: Dean Pemberton, from InternetNZ, New Zealand.

InternetNZ is very strongly supportive of the formation of this group, and feels very strongly that it should be open to all stakeholders from the APNIC community. Perhaps there may be a planned effort to bring in stakeholders, including government, but the group should definitely stay open to all members from the community.

The planned purpose and role should centre around informal discussions and the sharing of ideas and information, that the focus should be on APNIC's agenda and issues, not necessarily focused on broader Internet governance matters.

The broader Internet governance issues can be contextual in background but should not necessarily be the focus. Agendas should cover topical and upcoming challenges in the APNIC community.

We also feel strongly it should not be a policy formation group; that APNIC already has a very well established policy development framework, and this group instead, as its deliberations within it, should help inform and grow the information available to everyone in the current policy development framework.

A good outcome for us would be more sharing of information and perspectives from all stakeholders, including existing stakeholders and government, leaving the whole community, including government, better informed about everybody's issues. A bad outcome for us would be one where discussions in here were to clash with the policy development process or led to a lack of clarity around where policy was made.

Thank you very much.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you.

Brajesh Jain (NIXI, ISPAI): The discussions over the last few years have happened about public policy. We have also seen that the Internet, which used to be a sort of simple browsing, has now become very important for commercial business, and as a business enabler, especially into the new economies and the developing countries.

As the Internet is evolving for business, it has also got to be stable. Just because I am sitting in my domain, I cannot make Internet to be stable, except my system. So there is an ecosystem, and all the economies have to cooperate in a certain manner, especially matters relating to security and matters relating to proliferation of IPv6.

As in the morning session, we saw that X percentage,

single digit percentage, of websites are IPv6 enabled. And especially in security and exchange of information, for that, the cooperation of government is very much required.

What we have found is that if we assume the government is fully informed, and vice versa, the dialogue is on, and we have seen many issues get resolved if we are able to go and tell them, especially in a forum like this.

I think it is very wonderful, and thank you, Chairman, for taking the initiative to take it forward.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Mr Jain.

Given the fact that the essence of this committee is truly multistakeholderism, I would now like to encourage and request the participants who represent the government community to please come forward and share your views.

I see Dr Govind, Mr RM Agarwal, and any government representative from Asia Pacific countries, we would like to hear your suggestions and your thoughts, because it is important that we have truly a mix of all stakeholders to share the thoughts. Whatever is the outcome in terms of functioning of the PPAC, the results are always positive, and we have informed and enlightened discussions every time.

Rakesh Mohan Agarwal: Thank you, Mr Naveen.

As I told you, I am very happy to participate in this committee, PPAC, where the government is a stakeholder. The point is, the necessity is there; but how to involve governments of different economies?

First of all, I would like to add one point, which is that as governments move ahead with their policies, so if we can invite those governments by any means -- invitations can be sent by the APNIC Secretariat or by this committee itself -- whatever policy they are coming out, those policies can be just consulted and discussed for the benefit of other governments in the APNIC region. But at least other governments can also benefit by the policies of those governments, to get the first ideas.

Of course, by the APNIC outreach programs in different economies we can engage with different governments, they can be invited to different APNIC meetings also. I think, as Mr Ajwani rightly said, yes, government representation is truly important in this APNIC forum and this committee, otherwise I don't think every government is truly represented in the APNIC forum. Once the government is truly involved in the APNIC meetings, then definitely in this Internet Community benefits can be achieved.

We would like to share our thoughts about the policies we are doing in India, after you have given us a chance to present it, the IPv6 policy of India.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Mr Agarwal.

Anybody else who would like to share their thoughts on the structure, functioning and periodicity of PPAC meetings?

Laina Greene (GetIT): I am not a government representative, so am I allowed to speak?

Naveen Tandon: Please.

Laina Greene (GetIT): You particularly asked for government representatives.

Naveen Tandon: Our objective is to ensure gender balance and we really want to hear from you.

Laina Greene (GetIT): My name is Laina Greene, from GetIT. I was the founder of the Asia Pacific Policy Legal Group, which is still a SIG under APNIC technically. It is a mailing list for discussion.

I wanted to share some thoughts, based on history, that might be useful for this forum. I wanted to pick up on the point he raised, that you have to keep your focus on what APNIC is about.

APNIC has members, and I think anybody can become members, so if governments want to become members they can become members.

One of the valuable things that APNIC has done over the years -- in fact, in the early days, APNIC used to help policy development outside of policy of IP addresses in the ISWP process, but very quickly recognised it wasn't a core competence or core to the members, and therefore collaborated with APIA to do that.

Again, in APIA, being a trade association, you find that when you try to do too much that is outside the scope of what your members are there for, the members will start losing the value of why they are members of an organization.

That is the main thing I want to say: APNIC has a lot of clout, it has members, everyone should be encouraged to become members, but don't go beyond the core of what APNIC is about. If it is policy development related to IP addresses, fine, but if you want to get involved in a lot of other things, there may be another forum, and then collaborate and outreach to other forums. This is just my twopence worth.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you. Yes, Naresh.

Naresh Ajwani: Thank you very much for your reasoning and argument. This is exactly the different vision I have on this piece. We all understand the meaning of protocols. The majority of us are engineers out here.

There is a protocol for a stakeholder called government, and that is definitely not just an invitation. We have to follow respective protocols. It's not about going beyond the mandate what APNIC has; it is all about, repeatedly I'm saying, including them to understand the challenges we face in following their dictates or orders, which at times come without any kind of reasoning.

We can't blame them for that if we don't involve them in this and we don't advise them, don't guide them, don't suggest to them and don't make them part of such policies. That's why they don't understand it.

Still we want to have the persistence to disengage them by giving them a justification of an invitation, then we are losing the meaning of how to reach to the so-called marginalized.

Somebody can come and say government is not much enlightened, but definitely government is more enlightened in such kind of body. That justification we can't continue and multiply it by saying the mandate of APNIC. Internet touches everyone, Internet policies touch everyone. I think this private domain or its protection, that it is only meant for people who understand the policies, who understand the technology, has to be addressed.

My submission would be, let's think big and much bigger than what we are thinking currently.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Naresh. I think that is truly important, that every stakeholder presents their view, because that is the beauty of this group. Be it somebody is not liking a comment, that is perfectly okay, because everybody has a right to express their opinion. If there is a view that something has already been done in APNIC, so we should try to have a different view, so we respect that.

Is there anybody who wants to speak on this, or we will go on to the next agenda item.

If there can be some thoughts on the actual operational and administrative mechanism of the committee, we do not think it has come up clearly, so we would like to propose, subject to your agreement, that if we can form a small subcommittee which can help work on the draft rules for a structure, functioning and periodicity, because it is equally important that we have a formal set-up for the PPAC submissions, so that whenever the meetings are conducted, they will say when the meeting are conducted, what meetings will be conducted, what will be the governing council, how many members will be there. These are all important issues to have a formal dialogue among all stakeholders.

Can we invite nominations from different economies to be part of this committee, maybe two or three representatives who can be part of the subcommittee and submit their recommendations and a draft report to us for evaluating.

Yes, Rajesh.

Yes, Dean.

Anybody from other stakeholders, governments, women in ITC, technical, academia, civil society? Can you please introduce yourself?

Omkar Rai (NIXI): Mr Omkar Rai.

Naveen Tandon: We have Mr Omkar Rai, Mr Rajesh Chharia and Mr Dean, who will form a small subcommittee. Until the next APNIC, their mandate will be to prepare a draft on the structure of this PPAC, how the committee will run, what will be the governing mechanism. There will be a process to discuss periodicity -- and Dr Govind. That's it, four people.

In terms of time lines, can we assume that in the next APNIC, APNIC 36, you will be ready with a draft for functioning? Thank you.

Laina Greene (GetIT): I would like to volunteer too.

Naveen Tandon: We have five nominations now.

Thank you for that encouraging response. We look forward to having you. If we can create a working

group, a separate mailing list, or we can use the same working group for email discussions, for you to share thoughts and invite comment, you are free to do so.

Are there any more participants who have some questions?

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): To maintain the gender balance, I want to withdraw from the group, because Laina has come to the group and I withdraw in support of her.

Sunny Chendi: Amritsa, from Delhi, is raising her hand.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): She is nominating.

Naveen Tandon: We already have --

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): Take one more.

Naveen Tandon: Okay, fair enough. We will still have five nominations. All right.

Omkar Rai (NIXI): I will withdraw, because Mr Chharia has shaped the whole thing, so I will withdraw.

Naveen Tandon: So we have a few now.

Shayam Nair: Both of you withdraw. You want to withdraw?

Omkar Rai (NIXI): Yes.

Naveen Tandon: We have four nominations. The charter will be that they will be working on the specific structure level report for the functioning of PPAC. In terms of timeline, we expect a report to be submitted to us before the next APNIC 36, which we will publish that and we will formally announce.

We move on to the next agenda item. We want to have an interactive session, because we had a discussion on how much role each stakeholder should play in this committee, but we have not discussed the issues we would like to take up.

We do not want to impose any topics, so we would like to invite submissions, because we want, apart from discussion, some important useful recommendations, because the committee here represents diverse stakeholders in different economies, so it is important that all of us bring the experiences and international best practices on various topics of interest.

There can be discussions on security; there can be discussions on access and diversity; there can be discussions on content, spam, and many issues concerning the Internet today.

Are there any topics which you would like to discuss and take forward in the form of working groups on submitting a presentation, or some thought process in terms of topics of interest we would like, so that all members of the group stand as a participant in the discussion but at the same time stand to benefit from the outcome of the reports, which we can, if you agree, we can make it a regular affair.

So there can be a report on security, cyber

security, what is seen as a major threat to the Internet, cyber security, spam. There can be topics in terms of localization of data, there can be topics on how access and diversity should be improved.

In case there are any suggestions somebody would like to work upon, please feel free here to share your thoughts, and would you like to prepare a small topic of interest which can be shared and everybody can stand to benefit from that.

Ole Jacobsen (Cisco, APIA): Ole Jacobsen from Cisco and also APIA, APRICOT Management Committee.

Naresh said we not only need to invite government people but I think we also need to educate them. The Government Advisory Committee -- I know that's not what it's called -- but part of the function, from my perspective, of the Government Advisory Committee in ICANN is that it advises the government, not the other way around; it educates them.

One of the things that should be a topic here is education. Just inviting people to show up here, who don't necessarily understand how we work and the technology we work with, isn't going to cut it, I don't think. We need much more than outreach and much more of an education thing if we really want those people to be part of the discussion. Thank you.

Brajesh Jain (NIXI, ISPAI): Mr Chairman, I think you already covered issues like security and spam, and there are additional issues because the Internet has now become very important for business, issues like copyright. Because even yesterday, ICANN CEO mentioned that they would like to have some common copyright and all that, and these issues will become very important, in whichever manner they can be addressed. Education is, of course, one part. Thank you.

Naresh Ajwani: This is in response to Ole's observation, I agree with him 99.9 per cent. 0.1 per cent is missed out only because the word is not "education", the word is "engagement". My humble submission is that APNIC has to have an outreach program for this engagement. People like Ole can really lead this outreach program, that is where they involve and engage important stakeholders.

If Ole is accepting the word "engagement" instead of "education" and have an outreach program, I support 100 per cent what Ole has said.

Ole Jacobsen (Cisco, APIA): Thank you.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you. First of all, the constitution of the committee is already settled in terms of what stakeholders represent. In case there are any other suggestions -- the sub-working group has been announced -- please feel free to provide suggestions on

how it can be improved and whether any particular stakeholders need to be educated or engaged or to collaborate, because it is important that, as stakeholders, everybody should be invited to share their thoughts, and respected in terms of their knowledge and outreach.

Thanks, everyone, for sharing their thoughts. We will move to the next round.

James Spenceley (APNIC EC): I have a question. I know many of the people in the room, but some I don't know. It would be great to understand how successful we have been at getting people from the government into this room, to either be educated or to educate them.

Just for my reference, is there a show of hands from people here whose primary role is as a government representative?

Naveen Tandon: We request the participants from government to please raise your hands.

James, I think the objective is, this is the first inaugural session and, as in any other committee, we have to make a beginning. We have a beginning right here, and the more we engage, the more participative we will become, we will certainly have more.

James Spenceley (APNIC EC): Absolutely. I just wanted to get a feel for our starting position.

Naveen Tandon: I want to thank everyone, especially government and industry people who have come all the way to Singapore to be part of this committee. In terms of multistakeholderism, this is reflecting right now.

Just on housekeeping, we have, in order to capture it, one of the objectives of today's meeting will be to present the report in the AMM. We have submitted a sheet, which is not meant to be a bureaucratic attendance sheet, but if you would be kind enough to put your name, your designation and the organization you represent, that will help us in getting the right number of people who attended from which stakeholder community.

Laina Greene (GetIT): Just tying in to the point that Naresh had spoken about, to elaborate on Ole's point on education and outreach, I think -- I was the first policy adviser to APNIC because I helped Dave Conrad to set up APNIC.

What I would say is that APNIC has been typically engaging in OECD, in APEC-Tel, and many forums that governments tend to be at. There is outreach going on.

From what I understand -- correct me if I'm wrong, Ole -- a lot of the outreach seems to continue, which is part of the reason we even have the ICANN representatives here, because of what Paul Wilson has done in outreach.

What I want to pose here is that I get what Naresh and others are talking about, because the only reason I got involved in telecom and Internet and anything to do with APNIC is my passion for making sure all stakeholders are heard. I understand that and I acknowledge that.

But at the same time I'm thinking that APNIC has been good at what they do, and what needs to be done continues. There is a lot of training that goes on, and APNIC, I believe, has been very good about going to various countries and doing training to help them understand IPv6 transition and so on.

My only concern is, just because there's a gap, don't try to dump everything onto one organization only, but try to recognize if this organization can do what they do best, and outreach and participate, but don't try to expand their mandate and lose the core competence, and engage other organizations as well.

APIA ran into that. We were very focused on Internet peering issues, etc., then we started getting involved in Internet governance, down to IHC, ICANN, and then we began to lose our members, people began to go away. Now, APIA today does pretty much the organizing of APRICOT, when its core competence was the trade association. Maybe it is time to talk to APIA to see

whether they should be doing some of the work as well. That's my point.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you.

Naresh, I would request the submission to be brief because we have other agenda items.

Naresh Ajwani: Clarity is the main agenda of this program, but I will respect the Chair, in case he wants me to be as brief as possible.

I am witness to many debates taking place in APNIC and across other such bodies; whether this entire gambit should come under ITU or remain in APNIC. The precise reason is that we never expanded or we never thought of engaging other stakeholders. If this debate you want to continue, and in the process some governments stand and say, "Sorry, goodbye, APNIC. Let's continue with what we are doing." The best way to check this particular concern is by including them.

I clarify, and at the cost of being repetitive, it is not about training and education, it is about engagement. That may lead to education, but the word is engagement. Thank you.

Miwa Fujii (APNIC): Thank you, Naresh, for the clarification of "engagement". I would like to clarify the things which so far have been engaged from the IPv6 point of view. APNIC has been engaging with the

APEC-Tel, APT, SPC and also ITU around IPv6 very heavily. We conducted the three-day workshops since 2009 at APEC-Tel and engaged with every single APEC-Tel meeting and ministerial meetings, and we also go to the APT meetings and Pacific Telecommunications governmental meetings as well regularly. And at SPC we also engaged with the most recent ministerial conference and we presented the IPv6 importance. They actually included this in their ministerial statement, and APEC did as well.

Maybe we can increase furthermore our engagement, but so far, from IPv6 point of view, I wanted to share what we have done so far, and hope that will increase the clarification on what we are doing so far. Thank you.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you.

Rajesh, we are running out of time. In terms of what will constitute -- all stakeholders will be included in the committee is already a settled question. I would request members to not raise issues on stakeholders' question and their participation.

Naresh Ajwani: This is a deliberation. This is a discussion.

Naveen Tandon: That is okay. But we have crossed a certain mile, and we have crossed that particular bridge

in terms of the committee has been constituted, and now it is important and I would request member participants to engage effectively so that the committee becomes effective.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): When I introduced this proposal, GAC, Government Advisory Committee, and after listening to a lot of things, even from the APNIC staff, that training and education; but my objective was engagement and agreement, and that too was a very proper protocol with the government, because the government only agrees with the protocol and do as per the protocol. So that's my suggestion.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you. We will now move to the next phase of the agenda, and we have three presentations lined up for this session.

I would like to first invite Mr Dean Pemberton, principal consultant of InternetNZ, to make his presentation.

Dean Pemberton: Hello and welcome everybody. My name is Dean Pemberton and I'm a policy adviser for InternetNZ.

What I want to do today is to explain a little bit about what InternetNZ is and how InternetNZ engages in public policy, both within New Zealand but on a more global scale as well.

InternetNZ is a non-government organization set up

to protect and promote the Internet for New Zealand. It's a member-based organization and is open to everyone. It also holds the delegation for the .nz domain and operates the .nz domain through two subsidiaries. Some of the proceeds from that work fund the policies and international work that I will present today.

How do we address issues of our public policy? We do it through a series of submissions, position papers and open letters, campaigns, blogs and media commentary; we participate in conferences and meetings just like this one; and we also hold conferences ourselves and we discuss these issues with our members throughout New Zealand.

As I said, a large part of InternetNZ's role is to influence or assist in the development of public policy which touches on the areas within the organization's objectives.

We tend to make regular submissions to the following kinds of bodies: government, regulators, parliament, industry bodies such as APNIC. You will notice I am on the agenda a lot during this meeting, and I will be contributing within the Policy SIG. We also contribute to other global Internet governance bodies. We acknowledge, like the previous speaker, that APNIC is

not particularly the forum to address every single Internet governance issue, so we make sure we are across the forums where that is more appropriate.

We have a number of work streams. The work streams centre around access, openness, rights and responsibilities with the Internet, as well as security.

What I want to do now is to highlight some of the work we are doing within those areas, so that you can see the kinds of areas that InternetNZ is having an influence in within public policy in New Zealand.

On access, we are looking at things like the World Internet Project, unconstrained broadband, understanding what the Internet usage statistics are within New Zealand. New Zealand is a unique country where we have data caps; a worrying fact that seems to be gaining some more traction worldwide. We work towards understanding what are the barriers to unmetered domestic Internet traffic, the digital dividend, the economic impact of the Internet and convergence.

Quite a lot of what InternetNZ does centres around the idea of openness. Openness can mean a lot of things. We are particularly taking a role in these initiatives: looking at Internet governance involvement; looking at IPv6 and how that will be deployed, not only within New Zealand but on a global scale; Internet

filtering, there are cases for and against Internet filtering, and we certainly have positions on that; and we are engaging in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and providing information to the New Zealand Government on these sorts of issues.

Rights and responsibilities: a large part of our work recently has been around copyright reform and copyright issues on the Internet. Law and the Internet, so what we don't want is legislators making laws that affect the Internet without being fully cognisant of what those effects will be. We work hard to ensure that law makers within New Zealand have all the relevant information. They do not always listen but we make sure they have access to that information.

Another large area for us is human rights and the Internet -- making sure that human rights have a place on the Internet and the Internet is essentially another human right.

Security: spam is a large problem globally. Within New Zealand we have a good set of legislation now around spam and that is something that InternetNZ was very -- InternetNZ played a central role in the development of that legislation, so we are very happy with it.

Another one is what we are calling harmful digital communication. Other people might call this

cyber-bullying, but we think it goes a little bit further than the traditional definition of cyber-bullying. We are looking closely now at harmful digital communication and how governments might choose to legislate to protect vulnerable people on the Internet, without over-legislating and then affecting the rights of the rest of the citizens, and looking to make submissions around that.

The way we make submissions is we have defined a set of policy principles, and they are written up here -- not for me to read through, because I will be going through them more later. The URL is there for anyone participating remotely.

These underpin the work we use to approach our public and technical policies, making sure that it is both transparent and predictable. We don't want to be engaging long term with government and have them not know really what InternetNZ's position will be. We would like our position on things to be a well stated principle based approach, so that we don't seem to be coming from all over the place on every issue.

Internally within InternetNZ, these principles are used to guide the development of policy positions and statements and externally they explain the basis of InternetNZ's views on a particular issue. Anyone who is

on the Policy SIG will have noticed recently, for the two policies that are up for this meeting, the InternetNZ submission went back to our policy principles and assessed the proposals in line with those.

The first principle is that we believe the Internet should be open and uncapturable. Openness plays an important role, but it should be also uncapturable. If a single group were to establish power over the Internet then that's not something we would like to see, and that's really a thread that plays through most of our positions on public policy matters.

Internet markets should be competitive. Should market conditions prevent or inappropriately constrain choice, then regulation may be appropriate, but overall the market should be competitive.

Internet governance should be determined by an open multistakeholder process. It should be open to all participants and it should definitely be multistakeholder. The Internet is enriched by its diversity, as we have spoken about today, and that includes the technical community, civil society, academia, government and the private sector, and making sure all those groups are involved in Internet governance is very important.

Laws and policies should work with the architecture

of the Internet, not against it. It is very important that when we talk to legislators and we try to explain to them what the impacts of their proposed legislation are, that we look at those laws and policies working with the Internet. Harmful acts in the digital realm can be quick to injure and relatively slow to redress, but we really want laws not to impact the technical architecture.

We feel very strongly that human rights should apply online as well as offline. People have a right to exercise their fundamental human rights, freedom of speech, opinion of expression and we want to make sure these rights are respected online as well. We want to make sure nation states have an obligation to see that these rights are protected, regardless of when they are exercised in an online forum or on the street.

The Internet should be accessible by and inclusive of everyone. It is an essential social and economic infrastructure and more and more is becoming linked inextricably to our daily lives. The importance of the Internet to every New Zealander is something we take very seriously.

Technology changes quickly, so laws and policies should focus on activity. What this really means is if you have a law that focuses just on a technology, the

minute that technology changes, the law basically becomes obsolete. If you take laws and policies and base them on the activities around what's happening then they have much more longevity and they do not -- you can imagine laws talking about Archie and Gopher and all that stuff; they are talking about technologies which have been long dead.

If we want to have Internet legislation that stands any sort of a chance of being relevant into the future, we have to make sure that it focuses on activities, not technology.

We also believe that the Internet is a nationally important infrastructure and should be protected. I do not think anyone would argue with that.

A little bit more about current initiatives. One of our current initiatives is the FairDeal Coalition. We have joined a number of domestic and international, both commercial and not-for-profit, organizations and are looking at advocating a balanced copyright law in the TPP agreement. That is an example of one thing we are doing.

A lot has been spoken today about government outreach and government engagement, and this is something we are extremely cognisant of and take very seriously in InternetNZ, to the extent we have started

up a parliamentary Internet forum and have agreed to work with Members of Parliament who have agreed to be participants in this. We are going to make a seminar series on Internet related topics of their interests, as well as our interests, to make sure they are a lot more informed about these issues. It is not just education, it is very much the outreach and engagement model.

Also, spectrum is a very hot topic for us at the moment. We are engaging with the government on their policy with regard to spectrum allocation, including whatever option rules are going to be imposed in the near future.

I will not read through all of these, but this is a look at some of the submissions that InternetNZ has lodged just in 2012. There are a lot of submissions to government on Internet related issues.

Yet again, there are position papers here as well.

Thank you very much. Any questions?

APPLAUSE

Naresh Ajwani: Just one quick comment. Dean, this is one such kind of a model I have been advocating since we got this committee meeting started. But there is one more piece which I would like to bring to your notice. A community and a government engagement is one piece of a discussion and is the same combination having a

discussion at an Asia Pacific or a global level. These governments change when they meet alone, so it is very appropriate that these governments are on the same page when they are discussing within their country and across the countries.

Dean Pemberton: Absolutely.

Naresh Ajwani: This is my request again: please plan for an outreach program. That investment would be the right investment for our longevity.

Dean Pemberton: Just in response, the importance of a consistent message here is why InternetNZ is absolutely supportive of this forum and both having input from the likes of InternetNZ and what we are undertaking and the message we are taking to the New Zealand Government, as well as hearing similar messages from around the region. The more information and the more communication we have in open forums like this, the more benefit there will be.

Brajesh Jain (NIXI, ISPAI): Dean, you mentioned rightly in your presentation that a particular group should not be able to control the Internet.

Dean Pemberton: Yes.

Brajesh Jain (NIXI, ISPAI): There are two situations here: Internet is no longer in the country, so such a group could very well reside in other economies, so

I think through this process of outreach it is possible to have mitigation of some such threat from such a group.

Dean Pemberton: InternetNZ is very committed to a true multistakeholder approach when it comes to Internet governance. That is something we feel is very important.

Emilio Madaio (RIPE NCC): I wanted to comment on one slide, the one related to laws and policies focusing on activity. Thank you for highlighting this.

In our community we have a history of policies that are focusing on, for example, v6 transition technology and didn't take off, and when it is a policy just focusing on the transition itself, we are more successful. This is a concept that should be spread out more. Thank you for highlighting it.

Dean Pemberton: Thank you very much.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Dean, for your presentation. We agree it is important that all international organizations should cooperate in tackling and building the environment of an ICT, including the Internet, where it can be used safely anywhere at any time for anything. Thank you.

I would now invite Mr RM Agarwal to make his presentation.

Mr Agarwal, just a small request, to make it five minutes.

Rakesh Mohan Agarwal: I don't want to go into the details, but the name of the committee is the Public Policy Advisory Committee, and of course from the discussions going on in this forum, as far as this name, what is our mandate and what is the work involved with this committee?

Public Policy Advisory Committee, it means whatever public policy, whatever policy is there for the public, and this forum can suggest to different governments.

By the way, the Government of India has already come out with such policy as far as IPv6 implementation in the country is concerned. So, basically taking a cue from different audiences, especially from Mr Ajwani, whatever best practices are going on around the APNIC region that is taken by different governments, in case this committee feels it is good for the community then the implementation of those policies can be advocated for other governments also and the respective governments can facilitate in implementation of those policies in different regions. That should be the purpose of this committee.

Definitely I won't go into the details of this policy. Recently we have come out with detailed policy

guidelines of IPv6 implementation in the country.

As I told you, one policy decision was taken by the government in July 2010, some guidelines were issued, and, of course, those guidelines were achieved.

This is the status of the different government sectors and different parameters in India. But of course some issues were there. These are different issues.

As I told you this morning, the content and devices were the main issues involved with the policy implementation as far as IPv6. Definitely, in respect of this committee, if we can come out with a model on content adoption, what should be done with end user devices, how we can facilitate end user devices to go for IPv6; those can be one thing. Of course, skill set development is one very important aspect, and APNIC is already doing it for different governments, as far as the outreach program is concerned.

After having achieved considerable implementations, after IPv6 road map 1, then we have come out with road map version 2. The Centre for Innovation of IPv6 implementation in the country is again going to be a big thing and it has a different set of objectives. I won't go into the details of those objectives, but they are on the website. Of course, we are also coming out with the

skill set development programs from different agencies.

As I told you, we have come out with different IPv6 implementations and we have covered the whole ecosystems, the ecosystems of IPv6, covering service providers, content providers, manufacturers, government sectors and website providers. So the different time lines are there for the different services, different players.

For the service providers, it is the enterprise customers and for the enterprise customers we have given the date of the start is until 1 January 2014. For the service providers, as far as the retail customers are there, wireline customers, the date of starting IPv6 services, they should be in a position to offer IPv6 to retail customers from 30 June 2014.

Again, the question comes: service providers should be in a position to offer the services, but in case if the devices are not IPv6 ready, how can the customers utilize the services? Definitely, some mandate is there for the end users' devices also. Definitely, we have set some guidelines for the replacement of customers' equipment by the service providers.

As far as wireline or wireless equipment is concerned, these are the guidelines for the wireless and LTE equipment.

I am not going into the details of this, because of the shortage of time, but I will be covering all these details in my presentation tomorrow afternoon.

Of course, these are the equipment manufacturers. Because right now only 5 per cent of end user equipment especially is v6 compliant, so we have just firmed up whatever equipment is imported into the country, after June 2014 it should be only IPv6 ready.

This is the thing: basically, once we have only IPv6 equipment, only then we can have IPv6 proliferation in the country. So similar type of things can be done by consultation in this committee, for other countries also and for other committees also.

Of course, these are the guidelines for the government organizations. All government organizations should come out with an IPv6 function road map by December 2013, so that is a full transition road map by December 2013, and they should do it by December 2017, so that all equipment needed to be in place, the equipment life cycle is there, and by December 2017 they can completely go in for dual stack type of thing.

Of course, one of the major items for the IPv6 proliferation, as far as my understanding, it is not the address exhaustion point of view, but it is the applications. In Japan, most of the IPv6 proliferation

has been done because of the IPv6 applications. Japan has been able to say, "We can adopt IPv6 in smart grid, in smart buildings, smart city," so that economic advantages could be taken out of IPv6 adoption in the respective economies. Definitely, for the adoption of IPv6 we should adopt skill development also, which is very important.

Right now, IPv6 is not a part of the curriculum, so we have mandated all the government institutes, all the technical institutes should have IPv6 education in their curriculum in industrial colleges also.

In addition, all the cloud services, computing services and data services should target to adopt IPv6 by June 2014. These are the guidelines for the government, for the service providers, for the manufacturers, for the other ecoplayers.

My point is that once we have come out with such policies, and in case this committee -- I am not saying -- in case this committee feels it can be discussed and deliberated in this committee, in case they feel it can be suggested to other economies also, so that the advantage of one country can be taken up by the other countries also, and that can be amended and be the purpose of this committee. Thank you.

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Mr Agarwal for making the

presentation.

APPLAUSE

I would now like to invite Mr Manoj Misra from Cable & Wireless to make his presentation. We have limited time, so maybe two or three minutes.

Manoj Misra: Thank you, Chair. Very good afternoon, everybody. I will not take much time about this. I will talk very shortly about the Indian telecom sector, how the telecom sector is working and just very shortly about the regulatory environment in India.

Presently there are nine or 10 licenses in India, which will move for the unified license very soon. The government has initiated policy about that. Recently they have also issued a national telecom policy, NTP-12, for that, where they are going to develop for that.

You may be aware that India has separate bodies to govern for the licence activity and the regulatory system. Like in India, licenses were issued by the government, the Department of Telecommunications, and it is managed and recommended internally and overviewed by the regulator, which is called TRAI. So I will not cover much detail about that.

Certainly, a lot of the things happening about the Internet services in India, government has taken a lot of initiative for that. And as we are, as everybody is

aware, for the long-term sustainability of the telecommunications sector, especially on the data services. Therefore, every person of the government has recognized the importance of the data and they have recently taken a lot of the decisions and proactive decisions to increase the data service, including the Internet, broadband. Earlier, the previous speaker from India indicated the target set by the Government of India in this regard.

Just to give a flavour about how the financial figures is doing in India, as per the recent report published by the telecom regulator, TRAI, the total revenue of the Indian telecom sector was US$40 billion and out of US$40 billion, 76 per cent is revenue coming from the access services. Access services means the revenue is contributed by the mobile services and the fixed line services. I am not going to give detail about that. The rest of the amount, 24 per cent, is coming from other services. Other services include the long distance services, which constitute about 15 per cent of the total revenue, and the rest, about 8 per cent of the revenue is coming from the ISP services, which is well above US$3 billion for that.

ISPs have to play a very important role for that, as

per the policy initiated by the Government of India. Just giving a flavour about how the teledensity has been reached, I am putting a figure about teledensity as on 31 March 2012, which was about 78 per cent for that. Presently, urban teledensity is more than 160 per cent and rural is just 30 per cent more, 30 per cent for that. Certainly there are a lot of challenges for the ISP segment, where various initiatives have been taken by the government in the recent past for that.

I'm just giving about the financial viability, how the sector is moving. One of the important parameters which indicates how the business is doing, that is called EBITDA margin, which is earnings before interest, tax and depreciation, which in very simple terms is called the operating margin. Presently, India's EBITDA margin is about 15 per cent, which is generally the operating margin. Initially, the EBITDA margin was 40 per cent. When people slipped from the infrastructure setting or the capex model to opex model, then the operating margins have reduced substantially on this issue. So there is a challenge for the profitability.

The national telecoms policy has taken care about the profitability, how they can go ahead, as we are discussing about the PPP model. Therefore, every

government or the persons who are involved in the policy making, whenever they are making a policy they must also keep in mind the profitability and sustainable growth of the sector must be kept in mind when they are framing any legislation. These are the ideas I have put from the Indian side. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Naveen Tandon: Thank you, Manoj.

Are there any comments that anyone would like to share their thoughts before we propose a vote of thanks?

I now invite my Co-Chair, Mr Shyam Nair, to propose a vote of thanks.

Shayam Nair: It gives me immense pleasure to propose a vote of thanks for the first PPAC meeting.

As the Co-Chair, I am happy with the way the session is shaping. During the inaugural, all the keynote speakers spoke about the importance of Internet governance and multistakeholderism, which should be encouraged, and I believe this is the right time for the PPAC to introduce this.

Firstly, I express my sincere gratitude to Rajesh Chharia, who ran through the structure and importance of PPAC for the future of APNIC plus for the Internet industry. My thanks to Mr Akinori and Mr Naresh Ajwani for expressing their thoughts.

My thanks to Dean Pemberton, who has shared the Internet scenario of New Zealand through his presentation, which is very much in line with the preamble set in the PPAC information.

I am extremely thankful to Mr RM Agarwal from Government of India for his presentation, which is a prime example of how a government is driving a country to get ready for their future resources, which is IPv6.

My thanks goes to Rajesh Chharia for giving us some insight on the challenges, which will differ from country to country, but it is important and an interesting topic in future for the PPAC.

My sincere thanks to Mr Paul Wilson and again to Mr Akinori as the program has been carried out even to the smallest details because of their leadership and guidance.

My thanks to the newly formed subcommittee members; Naveen has the names and he will publish them. The seminar would have been meaningless without the presence of the seminar gathering who made the discussion interesting, and also thanks to the remote participants -- I think there was only one participant.

My special thanks to the session Chair, Mr Naveen Tandon and to the APNIC staff for arranging this session, especially Mr Sunny, who is present here, who

has been providing us all with the required inputs and all the infrastructure required to conduct the session. Thanks, once again.

APPLAUSE

Naveen Tandon: With that, we will conclude the first inaugural session. I look forward to your wider participation. Thank you.