AP* Retreat, Taipei, Taiwan

22nd August, 2005

Venue: Room CR-405, 4th Floor, Howard Plaza Hotel

 

Co-chairs: Tommy Matsumoto, APNG & Kenny Huang, TWNIC

 

Present:          Akira Mizushima, NARO

Atsushi ENDO, JPRS

                        Ching Chiao, TWNIC

                        Hiroshi Esaki, GSIST, University of Tokyo

                        Ian Chiang, TWNIC/APTLD

                        Izumi Aizu, Institute of HyperNetwork

                        James Seng, APEET

                        Kanchana Kanchanasut, intERLab/AIT

                        Kenny Huang, TWNIC

                        Kuo-Wei Wu, NIIEPA

                        Paul Wilson, APNIC

                        Pensri A., AIT/AP* Retreat Sec.

                        Shiori SATOU, JPCERT/CC

                        Shigeki Goto, Waseda University

                        Tommy Matsumoto, APNG

                        Xing Li, CCIRN

Zita Wenzel, APRUNet

 

Meeting commenced at 9:15 AM .

 

Agenda Bashing

 

The meeting started with greetings from the Co-Chairs, Mr. Tommy Matsumoto and Mr. Kenny Huang welcoming all the participants to Taipei.

 

• 1.           Roll Call

The chair then asked all the attendees to introduce themselves. It was followed by review of the day’s agenda by the Co-Chair, Mr. Tommy Matsumoto.

 

• 2.            AP* Organization and Meeting Reports

 

• 2.1.     Introducing Activities in APAN by Shigeki Goto

 

The presentation started with a brief history of APAN by the speaker, Prof. Shigeki Goto stating that the idea of APAN was born at APEC symposium in Japan in 1996 and the following year in 1997, APAN was established. A map marked with APAN regions and a list of APAN members were shown to the attendees. The structure of the APAN governance was briefly explained with a brief introduction of each of the members of the coordinating committee.

 

IRNC is the new name for the NSF projects which connects the APAN network with the US. With a diagram showing the network topology of TransPAC2, it was explained that TransPAC2 was a revised version of TransPAC1 and one of those projects. Gloriad, another of those projects connects Russia, China, and Korea with the United States. While speaking about PacificWave/TransLight Pacific Connections, the speaker said that talks were underway for an Australia to Singapore connection and for a direct connection from Australia to Japan. TIEN2 is a European activity and a new project which covers some of the Asia Pacific regions. The speaker then gave a national update speaking briefly about JP-WIDE: IEEAF links, HDTV over IPv6 in Korea, KR-KREAONet’s links for GLORIAD, KREONet2: Hybrid Backbone Networks, CN-CERNET peerings, CN-CSNet, SG-SingAREN GIX and AU-AARNET.

 

In network engineering, he informed the attendees that many people in the network operation center were interested in End to End (E2E) performance measurement and there was some collaboration globally too. In the applications area, APAN was in collaboration with some of the big clients including state clients and higher education clients such as the Belle Collaboration. There was also a joint research and seminar on tsunami organized by multiple groups in Thailand. The natural resource area covers areas such as database mirroring, huge DB development and sharing, distance learning, wild fire detection (ANDES/GOFC), PRAGMA Ecoinformatics project, field monitoring server project, yellow wind prediction and many more. Speaking about APAN’s telemedicine project, Prof. Goto announced that anyone interested can join the APAN medical section group. There was also good collaboration between the Japanese and Korean medical scientists and doctors and a new working group was being setup in the same week.

 

Before wrapping up the presentation, Prof. Goto gave brief details of the last APAN meeting which was held in Bangkok and announced the future meetings and the TIEN2 Kick-Off workshop that was to be held in September at intERLab, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. Finally, a list of names of the persons who contributed to the presentation was shown along with their topics.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         No questions and discussions held.

 

• 2.2.     Activities of APCERT by Shiori Satou

 

APCERT (Asia Pacific Computer Emergency and Response Team) is a coalition of CSIRTs (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) and CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Teams) across the Asia Pacific region. It was officially founded in February 2003. Starting from 15 teams from 12 economies, it now consists of 17 teams from 13 economies and a few more teams were expected to join in 2005. There are two levels of members in APCERT namely full members and general members and a list of these members representing different countries were shown to the attendees. The procedure for obtaining membership was briefly explained as well which requires fulfilling the accreditation rule, finding a sponsor organization among existing APCERT teams and passing the APCERT SC vote.

 

Objectives of APCERT:

• Encourage and support regional and international cooperation on information security in the Asia Pacific region.
• Jointly develop measures to deal with large-scale or regional network security incidents.
• Facilitate information sharing and technology exchange, including information security, computer virus and malicious code, among its members.
• Promote collaborative research and development on subjects of interest to its members.
• Assist other CERTs and CSIRTs in the region to conduct efficient and effective computer emergency response.
• Provide inputs and/or recommendations to help address legal issues related to information security and emergency response across regional boundaries.
• Organize an annual conference (APSIRC) to raise awareness on computer security incident responses and trends.

 

APSIRC (Asia Pacific Security Incident Response Coordination Conference) was held in Tokyo in 2002 and the next meeting was to be held in China in 2006. The activities in the year 2005 include the first annual conference which was held in June 2005 in Singapore, Network Security Training in July 2005 in Thailand and APEC TEL 32, in September 2005 in Korea. During the annual conference in Singapore, a MoU was signed between APCERT and TF-CSIRT (TERENA’s Task Force of Computer Security Incident Response Teams), which is the European counterpart of APCERT. The presentation was wrapped up with the objectives of 2005 which were to:

• Extend APCERT partnership in new Asia Pacific regions
• Consolidate APCERT POC arrangements
• Consolidate APCERT publicity through its homepage http://www.apcert.org/

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         One of the attendees during this session asked the presenter the definition of ‘region’ for APCERT and inquired if the organization dealt with the Middle East as well. The questioner informed that there was an Economic Conference between various Islamic countries in June/July, Kuala Lumpur and a discussion was held on setting up CERTs in the Islamic countries. In response to this, Ms. Satou informed that APCERT have had contact from Pakistan once.
• -         Prof. Goto suggested for a global contact point to which one of the attendees informed that some of the African regions were being taken care of by a few European members but more or less on voluntary basis.
• -         According to another participant, there would be regional organizations that will be building networks and networks similar to national internet registries going upstream for example there would be an all African network Cooperator’s group  meeting (AFRINIC) and that will be the topic that would be covered in that meeting.
• -         Further discussions followed on the issue of Middle East with concerns from some of the participants about the possible danger that could arise if they gathered under the Islamic group religiously. 
• -         When asked about the definition of RI (Regional Initiatives), it was explained that with the increase in a variety of security threats, it was necessary to promote regional and inter-regional cooperation and RI was an effort to do just that.
• -         Mr. Tommy Matsumoto later welcomed the attendees to join the APNG camp the following day for the camp hearing.

 

• 2.3.     APEET by James Seng

 

The speaker gave a local update on the activities of APEET (Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team). APEET has a new member; New Zealand and they were trying to get two more members (Thailand and Cambodia) on board but they were yet to conclude the discussion on the new members. Most of the activities of the organization for the past few months had been working on two trials. The first trial he announced would be conducted during the APAN meeting in Taipei and the participants would receive a SIP phone kit which would come with a SIP ID and a SIP password for the user. However the speaker announced that they had only about a hundred sets of phones available and the price would be much cheaper than the retail shelf price.  However the PSTN connections he said were available only to China, Singapore and Taiwan during the trial period. But he said they hoped to do a bigger trial with a thousand handsets during the IETF meeting in Vancouver and a couple of companies have expressed their interest in it.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Responding to a question, the speaker said that during the trial period in Taipei, calls could only be made to those countries which had provided the PSTN connections i.e. China, Singapore and Taiwan.
• -         Answering to another question, Mr. James said that Wi-Fi technology was used for the connectivity.  
• -         When asked by Mr.Paul if they would provide any information to people on how to configure and use the software, Mr. James answered that it was available on the APEET website http://www.apenum.org/APAN2005
• -         In response to a question by Mr. Izumi on what exactly APEET was doing in terms of selling the handsets, Mr. James explained that they were coordinating with the handset manufacturers by making those handsets reach the hands of the engineers and get those manufacturers to sponsor events in return.
• -         Mr. Izumi expressed that it would be nice to have it work all over the world. The speaker informed that there had been some requests though to provide training support for countries who would like to get onto ENUM but unfortunately he said that APEET had no budget to go forward with these requests.
• -         Finally after the questions, Mr. James announced that the members of JET (Joint Engineering Team) were starting a new work called “Internationalization of e-mail Addresses”. They already had two meetings. First one in APRICOT 2005 and second meeting in Beijing/China. An IETF draft had already been produced which was the first draft on internationalization of e-mail addresses written by the members. The goal was to form a new working group by IETF, Vancouver on internationalization of e-mail addresses.    

 

• 2.4.     APNIC Status Report by Paul Wilson

 

The speaker, Mr. Paul started with a slide with pictures of the staff of APNIC and mentioned that they come from diverse backgrounds. More than half of whom come from regions outside Australia.  Under the selected activities and services he talked about resource allocations of IPv4, IPv6 and ASNs. In order to allow APNIC members to get in touch with each other instantly APEET had recently launched a ‘Live Chat’ service and VOIP would be coming shortly. MyAPNIC is the service for members to come in and manipulate their allocations and services. It also has an online voting feature. Through that service, coming members meetings are launched. ICONS (Internet Community Online Network Source) is another project being launched this year. It is an ISP support website which provides guidelines and sort of portal for people to walk to and provide information about network engineering, what products are available, provide technical information and so on.  Another important service which was being worked on at that moment was resource certificates RFC 3779 (Secure BGP protocol). Training is an ongoing development and APEET has undertaken a few training activities in the areas, DNS, Routing, IPV6, and more recently, on SPAM and Security as well.

 

Another area of infrastructural development is the root servers project. Fourteen of ‘Anycast’ root servers (F, I, K) have been deployed so far with APNIC support and announcing three new sites in India. Work is under progress and underway to deploy root servers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and Sri Lanka. In the area of Internet Governance, the organization has had dialogs with different government representatives of countries like Korea, China and India. Open Regional Dialog on Internet Governance is a UNDP project where APNIC has provided both staff and operational support. The speaker informed the attendees that APNIC was now accredited by UN ECOSOC which was useful from the operational point of view and also because it reflected the recognition given to the work that APNIC was doing for the UN.

 

Winding up his presentation, the speaker announced the incoming APNIC meetings, the 20th in Hanoi, Vietnam in September 2005 and the 21st in Perth, Australia in February 2006 where people would be able to watch the sessions live on the Internet via video streaming and live transcripts.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Answering a question about ECOSOC, the speaker replied that it was the Economic and Social Council of the UN; one of the many UN agencies. Its role is to network with non-government sector who have been involved with economic and social issues and which has a complex sense of recognition process. But once an organization is recognized through ECOSOC, it has a permanent seat to UN meetings as an ECOSOC member.
• -         Mr. Izumi added to the above discussion that having ECOSOC’s accreditation gives the organization a generally accepted NGO status and it’s a fairly convenient way to get into UN meetings without any hassles.

 

• 2.5.     APNG by Tommy Matsumoto

 

Mr. Tommy Matsumoto, Chairman of the APNG camp said that one of the big differences between the previous APNG camp that was held in Kyoto, Japan and the one that was being held in Taipei, Taiwan was the executive committee. Professor Okhwa Lee from Korea was announced as the new chair of APNG camp. The speaker then briefly went through the committees of the organization team.  Usually the secretariat belongs to the Chair of APNG. So, the chair normally had his team to function as a secretariat. But in order to overcome the problems faced in transferring the systems each time a new chair takes over, it was decided to have a permanent secretariat instead and Mr. Tommy announced that Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) would now function as the permanent secretariat.  Speaking about the history of APNG camp, he informed that the first camp was held in Bangkok in February 2002 and during the 6th camp held in Kyoto, Japan, there were sixty participants from fifteen countries out of which 26 were fellows. The fellowship program was initiated from the 5th camp held in Cairns, Australia. It was proposed by Kilnam Chon and the speaker expressed his happiness over the fact that it has been very successful. He also said that Professor Kanchana and the AIT team had been helping the fellowship program very much and in selecting the fellows as well. The speaker also expressed his appreciation for the good job that the selected fellows had been doing in the camp.

 

One new activity of APNG he said would be holding the RALO (Regional At-Large Organization) meeting. APNG supports ICANN’s At-Large membership and works for the establishment of RALO in the AP region. The speaker then briefed the audience with the APNG camp fellowship program and the many sponsors who had generously contributed to APNG and the APNG camp. Mr. Tommy said that because of the success of the fellowship program, APNG could start some local camps too and he expressed his appreciation for the active participation of the fellows from regions such as Sri Lanka, Philippines, China and AIT. Winding up his presentation, the speaker Mr. Tommy informed the attendees that it was being discussed how to move the system to AIT in order to have a steady and firm APNG secretariat.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         No questions were put up and further discussions held after the presentation.

 

• 2.6.     APRUNet by Zita Wenzel

 

Speaking about the network, the speaker said that APRUNet http://www.apru.net.org/ was a group of thirty six leading research universities across the Pacific Rim. APRUNet projects:

• APRUNet/Internet2 Videoconferencing Workshops
• APRUNet East Asian Studies Project
• APRUNet  Global Infectious Diseases Project
• APRUNet Marine and Ocean Biology Project
• APRUNet President’s multi-multi-point videoconference
• E-Learning Specifications Workshop
• Participation in APAN meetings
• Online distance learning discussion list
• “Distance Learning and the Internet” Conferences

 

“In the Distance Learning Partnership Project”, APRUNet deals with high school partners and the faculty mentors of universities who are typically scholars in each field. This is achieved through a small grant by APEC. Projects of real global concern and not only attached to technology are also undertaken in the “Distance Learning Partnership Project”. They also had a Ocean and Marine Biology Focus over the past summer.

 

APRUNet has held five “Distance Learning and the Internet Conferences” over the past years. These are major international conferences on distance learning and the Internet and the speaker said they have been getting better and better. It is primarily attended by the APRU Universities but Ms.Wenzel emphasized that it is open to everyone and encouraged the others to take part in it or pass the information to their respective organizations that might be interested in attending it. The next conference is being hosted by Far Eastern National University, Vladivostok, Russia from 4-7 October 2005. Detailed information can be found at http://www.apru.org/activities/aprunet/

 

At the end of her presentation, Ms. Wenzel said that the need for students who were actively involved in distance learning activities was felt since they are the end users of such technologies. She asked the attendees to identify such students and requested them to inform her if they do find such students and then they will setup a panel to help them meet with their travel expenses to come to Russia to participate in the upcoming conference.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         No questions and discussions were held.

 

• 2.7.     APTLD Update by Ian Chiang

 

The speaker started his presentation with the agenda briefing. APTLD (www.aptld.org) is an association for Asia Pacific Top Level Domains. It is a regional organization for ccTLD Managers in Asia and the Pacific. At present it has twenty three ccTLD members and more were expected to join.  The secretariat is currently based in Wellington, New Zealand.

 

Speaking about the activities carried out by the association in 2005, the speaker informed the attendees that they had two meetings. The annual general meeting held in Kyoto, Japan in February, 2005 with associated technical workshop. The second meeting (members’ and board meeting) was held in Singapore in July, 2005. During the second meeting in Singapore, it was decided to establish an Internationalized Domain Names Committee and a Technical Forum to allow ccTLD managers and technical staff to share experience and ideas. In order to expand the staff support, they were in the process of appointing an APTLD General Manager.  They were also working on the WSIS working group on Internet Governance and the ccNSO’s current Policy Development Procedure Process.

 

APTLD’s future plans included major outreach effort in the west of the Asian continent for the next meeting, expand the content available to members through the APTLD website, expand remote participation options for APTLD meetings through better use of Internet technologies, commit increased resources to outreach in areas of the region not covered by the next meeting, working with ICANN to develop their plans for greater regional outreach and permanent training facility for ccTLD managers.

 

The upcoming meetings would be held in:

• Amman, Jordan from 2-3 October, 2005 – APTLD meeting.
• Wellington, New Zealand on 25 March, 2006 - APTLD AGM in conjunction with ICANN meeting.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Responding to a question, the speaker said APTLD acts as a regional organization for ICANN trying to reach out to as many as possible on behalf of ICANN.

 

• 2.8.     intERLab by Kanchana Kanchanasut

 

It was felt that a Human Resources Development Coordination center in the Asia Pacific Region was needed and AIT being an international institution fitted the requirements. Launched on December 15, 2003, it was endorsed by the ministry of Information and Communication Technology in Thailand.

 

Main functions of intERLab (http://www.interlab.ait.ac.th ) are:

• To concentrate on being the center with up-to-date information on Internet development and related information of the region.
• To provide training programs to enhance the skills of existing infrastructure engineers and technologists.
• To educate policy makers and government employees of the applications of the Internet.
• To update education specialists regarding e-learning technologies.
• To raise awareness of the social impacts of the technology amongst the development and social workers.
• To bring new business practices and their legal implications to the attention of lawyers, business practitioners and professionals.
• To conduct a multi-disciplinary research in three main directions: technical/engineering, e-learning and social/policy/business/legal aspects.
• To provide its laboratory services and expertise to the entire institute and others.
• To conduct regular academic program in Internet Engineering/Technology in close collaboration with other well-established academic disciplines within AIT and leading international institutions.

 

There are three research directions that intERLab is focused on:

• -         Internet Technology and Infrastructure
• -         Social/Governance and Policy/Legal Studies and
• -         Internet Applications

 

In case of Social and Governance issues, the center is currently working in collaboration with the School of Management at AIT. Prof. Kanchana also extended invitation to people who have worked with the WSIS process to be involved with the center’s program on Social and Governance issues. The primary partners of the center are INRIA, APNIC, NSRC, APAN and SOI-Asia of WIDE project. In the Internet and Applications area, the speaker said that the center would like to concentrate on e-learning infrastructure.  

 

The center’s services are broadly categorized into four classes; AP Internet Information Center, Trainings, e-education (e-learning) and Research. The center hosts AP* Retreat Secretariat, APAN Secretariat, functions as APNIC Event coordinator and APNG Secretariat was coming soon. Training activities coordinated by the center in the year 2005 included:

• AIT Online Platform for Course Delivery

• -         AIT Faculty and Staff

• Network Operators Workshop

• -         11 Network Operators

• APNIC IRM-E

• -         21 attendees from ISPs and networking environment

• Advanced DNS Workshop

• -         26 attendees from network operating centers

• UNIX System Administration Workshop
• Network security Workshop

• -         Opening ceremony with AIT President’s remarks
• -         More than 60 participants
• -         6 network engineers from GMS countries
• -         Instructors- ThaiCERT, JPCERT/CC, AIT/WIDE Project and CISCO engineers

Upcoming Trainings in 2005:

• TEIN2 Kick-off Workshop
• Traffic Measurement and Analysis Workshop
• Asian Internet Engineering Conference (AINTEC)
• Asian School on Computer Science

 

Speaking about e-education, Prof. Kanchana informed the attendees that the center concentrates on e-education infrastructure and has developed its own an e-learning platform. It also has a methodology for courseware development and these were used by ASEAN Virtual Institute on Science and Technology (AVIST) and Greater Mekong Sub-region Virtual University (GMSVU).  Expressing her enthusiasm to host online courses such as on Internet Governance, she believed that it would prove beneficial to government officials who need this kind of knowledge but do not have enough time to attend real sessions. 

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         When asked about the relationship between AINTEC and APRICOT in terms of contents and audience, Prof. Kanchana explained that AINTEC is research oriented, a bit like a network research workshop but more formalized, where graduate students get to submit their papers and selected candidates get to attend AINTEC.
• -         Responding to a question regarding the funds for AINTEC, the speaker informed that about 15% of the fund came directly from AIT.  The rest came from income generated by the center to cover the cost of various activities.

 

• 3.           Internet History Museum Activity and History of AP*’s by Atsushi ENDO

 

Explaining the need for an internet history museum, the speaker explained that over 10 years had past since the spread of the Internet and the birth of APNG. The next generation children unlike us would be very familiar with the Internet from an early age and would become members of the society. They will bring new point of view to us. The objectives of establishing this activity were stated as follows:

• -         To record the Pioneer’s efforts as “History”
• -         To archive the Internet History. For example, “First E-mail”
• -         To share Internet related history of each country/economy as “property” with whole Asia Pacific Internet community
• -         To learn Pioneers’ activity and to help create new ideas to enrich the Internet.

The speaker then briefly introduced the many versions of Internet History in Asia prepared by Prof. Kilnam Chon and updated periodically by the speaker himself. The full text version of which could be found at http://www.apstar.org/internetHistoryAP.html. Genealogy of Internet Organizations in Asia can be found at http://www.apstar.org/genealogy.html and the Internet History-Table v1.2 (1969-2005) can be viewed at http://www.internethistory.or.kr/historytable/ap_global.htm

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Mr. Tommy Matsumoto informed that each student/fellow brings information about his country’s internet history and situation which is then uploaded on the APNG website by the APNG Museum committee and can be viewed at http://www.apng.org.
• -         Mr. Tommy felt that it was very interesting to know the internet situation of the region. He also informed the attendees that APNG Internet History Museum committee and Mr. Atsushi Endo were trying to work together to expand the History Museum covering the AP region.
• -         Finally, Mr. Tommy suggested Mr. Endo to link the APNG museum site with Prof. Kilnam Chon’s site.
• -         Future plans included finalizing the draft version of the internet history museum and developing a website where information on the Internet history of the AP region could be found. Constant updating of the site would be done as more information is received.
• -         Mr. Izumi suggested conducting interviews of the Internet Pioneers and putting the audio files on the website which is much easier than writing. He also said that he would send the materials collected by him about internet history to the speaker. He also suggested discussing the problems and challenges faced in the early days of the Internet and try to discover what happened and how they were solved so that people can learn from history.

 

• 4.           Internet Governance “Voices from the Asia Pacific: a report on the ORDIG project” by Paul Wilson

 

The speaker informed that he was giving the presentation on behalf of APDIP (Asia Pacific Development Information Programme) which is a UNDP project.

 

ORDIG is Open Regional Dialog on Internet Governance founded by the UNDP with support principally from IDRC (Canadian Government’s International Development and Research Center). It was formulated in response to a general view by those involved in the WSIS process that Asian views were not well represented in the WSIS and since APDIP was a well established Asian centered development program which is particularly involved with ICTs and development projects and also as a UN agency involved with the WSIS, it was well qualified to run this project. 

 

ORDIG is formed with an extensive advisory panel representing numerous people from different countries, sectors, academics, civil societies across the whole region. It did partner with ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) and also with APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center) and sent some staff to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to support the project. IDRC had provided the financial assistance then.

 

With the support of UNESCAP, several sub-regional consultations were held. There was an online forum which provided a lot of qualitative inputs; 180 participants; 27 countries; 350 postings. There was also an online survey which had over 1200 responses from 37 countries and that was also done with the aim to maximize its outreach and capture of inputs by language translation and strong promotion. There was also a research commission on numerous issues that were identified during the consultation process.

 

The main part of the project is finished with the production of an ORDIG paper and a policy brief. They produced some guiding principles in discussing Internet Governance, six key recommendations and main policy recommendations in different dimensions of Internet Governance. The project adopted some of the WGIG guiding principles so governance means more than government and government activities and enabling dimension include organized and cooperative activities between different stakeholders. In line with the UNDP and APDIP missions towards development, ORDIG itself adopted some of the principles towards human development; balance global and local interests and maintain stability and interoperability. The speaker then showed an example of the survey outputs showing the level of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with different aspects of internet governance like cyber crime, viruses, spam, privacy etc. The general key recommendations were:

• Subsidiarity: Multi-stakeholders are required at the national and grassroots/community levels. Centralized solutions are not an answer and not consistent with the ways the Internet operates.
• Governments have a role: Foster market environments to establish broad principles of governance such as competition ensuring benefits are equitably maximized.
• Multi-stakeholder participation is required
• Preserve cultural diversity
• Enhance participation with capacity building
• Supplement law with other tools

 

The dimensions and Specific Recommendations were:

• Infrastructure

• -         Access costs: ease ISP licensing, liberalize access to international bandwidth, encourage peering between ISPs and so on.
• -         Voice over Internet Protocol: Legalise VOIP, implement quality of service laws and others.
• -         Wireless: promote wireless as technology to bridge the digital divide.

• Logical

• -         Domain Name System: maintain one and only one authoritative root; promote local authority over ccTLDs etc.
• -         Internet Protocol Address Management: develop fair and equitable mechanisms for IPv6 allocations.
• -         Technical Standards: increase participation in international standards-creating bodies; use FOSS to promote open standards.

• Content

• -         Content “pollution” (spam, viruses, spyware etc): ensure legal steps do not diminish openness of the network.
• -         Cybercrime: promote codes of conduct and self-regulation.

• Social and Developmental

• -         Cultural diversity: enhance localized software and local content; protect international property rights
• -         Participation and capacity building: promote multi-stakeholder decision-making.

 

Speaking about the future plans, the speaker informed that next steps would be to forward the views/recommendations to WGIG and WSIS. ORDIG country reports were also being produced for selected countries who felt themselves to be special cases or different in terms of service spectrums of the dimensions identified in the report.  Finally summarizing, the speaker said that Internet governance was an ongoing process which will not end with the end of the working group on Internet governance. So, APDIP would continue with information dissemination, help with capacity buildings and develop Internet Governance toolkits.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Responding to a question by Mr. Izumi on the effect and the influence that the project had on the outcomes of WGIG, the speaker informed that the outcomes on WSIS was yet to be seen as there were more upcoming meetings and extensive negotiations had been going on in Geneva. He informed that within the WGIG, along with many other voices, this report had been well taken into account and helps to produce the outcomes of the WGIG.
• -         Mr. Izumi commended that ORDIG had done a very good job conveying the voices from Asia and the Pacific.

 

• 5.           Internet in Taiwan: Facts, Opportunities and Challenges by Ching Chiao

 

The speaker began the presentation with history of Internet in Taiwan. Internet started in Taiwan in the early1990s with TANet (Taiwan Academic Network) which belongs to the Ministry of Education (MOE).

• .tw was delegated to TANet in the year 1989 (contracted with ICANN in 2003)
• First connection to NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network): 1992
• First IP allocation: 1992
• First www server: 1993 by Yam technology (www.yam.com)
• First Internet service introduced by Seednet in 1992
• Seednet became the first ISP after being commercialized in 1995

 

TWNIC was initially setup as a 2-year project in TANet which was later institutionalized in 1999 and became financially independent. In 2001, it was officially regulated by Taiwanese Telecom Act. The presenter then presented some quick facts about the number of Internet users, Mobile phone penetration, number of skype users and an estimated number of blogs that existed in Taiwan. Next, with the help of charts and graphs, it was observed that the growth rate of the Internet and broadband users was slow but steady. Out of the total population of about 23 million, approx. 15 million of them had Internet access. The penetration of Internet and broadband households was also very high with 4.91 million (68.34%) out of 6.6 million households with Internet access and 4.08 million (56.84%) with broadband. The growth of mobile (GPRS/GSM/PHS) and wireless access was however found to be slower in comparison with the growth of broadband connection. A large portion of the population still preferred ADSL over other Internet access services (78.59%). Among the ADSL service providers, Hinet was the most popular with 81.74% of the Internet users using their services. It was also found that 63.52% of the broadband users accessed Internet as a tool to browse web pages, 43.82 for e-mails, 29.59% for information searching and the remaining for other purposes such as online games, chatting, online shopping, downloading music etc. Among the mobile Internet users, the most frequently used service was downloading ring-tones (44.31%) followed by information browsing (13.62%). The IP and DN statistics showed that the total number of all English .tw domain names were 157,531 with 116,489 for .com.tw and 21,477 for IDN.tw. The total number of IPv4 address allocations was 15153152 (/32) and that of IPv6 was 17 (/32). The growth chart of .com.tw domain name showed an increase of 30,000 domain names from December 2002 until July 2005 whereas there was a decrease in the domain name registration for the Chinese .tw domain (21,477 drop off) for the same period.

 

Digital content was thought to be an area with good opportunities. Content business in Taiwan was a major government sponsored industry with tax exemption and with government support. Content aggregator also plays an important role because of IP (Intellectual Property) management and most importantly because of trends and technologies like Blogs, Moblogs and Podcast, consumers were producing content and becoming producers.  Another opportunity that the speaker saw was mobile Internet over the third generation. WiFi was another technology that was considered a potential opportunity. Also with the popularity of emails, SMS, MMS and camera phones, demand for data is on the rise. Finally, P2P service was also thought to carry potential opportunity for growth as people get in contact with the real users.

 

Wrapping up his presentation, Mr. Ching Chiao said that  although Taiwan ranked among the top 5 in e-readiness worldwide, they still needed to handle problems like ISP local peering, SPAM/Net Security/Content Rating, Regulation on Convergence Network (NCC), International issues like WSIS, ICANN etc.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Mr. Tommy asked the speaker to share how the survey was conducted. The speaker informed that they used a software called CATI, a telecom interview software for the survey samples.
• -         The next question was regarding the PHS service in Taiwan, to which the speaker informed the attendees that they do have the service in Taiwan which offers roaming service and they had around 200,000-300,000 subscribers. The service provider was now a subsidiary of one of the largest telecom service providers and they had merged together.  

 

• 6.           WSIS Report by Izumi Aizu

 

WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) was originally proposed by delegates to the ITU plenipotentiary meeting in 1998. It is endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly as a multistakeholder process and is under the high patronage of the Secretary General. The speaker said that the background of the WSIS was to help the developing countries to gain information from ICTs. There are two phases of WSIS in reality; the Geneva phase in December 2003 and Tunis in November 2005. Even though it was being claimed that it was a multistakeholder process, in reality it is an intergovernmental process of member states where observers could participate. There are preparatory processes where each phase has three so called prepcoms which are very lengthy and tiring. But there are many regional meetings where they compile a document of declaration and in final WSIS process, these documents are taken into consideration.

 

A declaration and a plan of action were passed at the first phase of the WSIS summit which basically put sustainable social and human development at the center and the three-way partnerships (government, private sectors and the civil society) in the information society was reaffirmed. There were some contentious issues though like digital solidarity fund which was opposed. And the second issue was the Internet governance. One of the outcomes of the summit was setting up of a working group on Internet Governance (WGIG) as there was no consensus on the definition of Internet Governance. The purpose of this group was to:

• Develop a working definition
• Identify the relevant public policy issues
• Develop a common understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders
• Make recommendation, as appropriate, for possible improvement for action
• Issue a report for the Tunis phase.

 

The WGIG was started comprising 39 members with Nitin Desai (Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General) as the chairman. After a preparatory and four official meetings, the WGIG report was produced on July 14, 2005. The key agreements of this report were briefly discussed by the speaker which called for strong support for participation of all stakeholders, adopted a broad definition of Internet Governance and said that no single government should be pre-eminent in global governance indirectly referring to the role of the US government, among other agreements.

 

The report also discussed and identified the following public policy issues:

• Administration of the root zone files and system.
• Interconnection costs
• Internet stability, security and cyber crime
• Spam
• Meaningful participation in global policy development
• Capacity building
• Allocation of domain names
• IP addressing
• Intellectual property rights (IPR)
• Freedom of expression
• Data protection and privacy rights
• Consumer rights
• Multilingualism
• Other important issues (convergence, next generation networks and so on)

 

Different roles and responsibilities were mentioned in the report for the governments, private sectors and the civil society with the civil society having most of the responsibilities and roles to play as they were active participants.

 

The speaker said that four models were being proposed:

1. Model 1: GIC (Global Internet Council)

• -         Governments as members; private sector and civil society advising.

2. Model 2: No oversight

• -         No specific oversight organization – possibly enhanced role for existing GAC (Governmental Advisory Committee)

3. Model 3: International Internet Council (IIC)

• -         Governments take the lead role and not anchored with the UN.

4. Model 4: Global Internet Policy Council (GIPC)

• -         Appoints the oversight committee through ICANN
• -         Government led. Private sector and civil society are defined as just observers.

However, the speaker informed that there had been diverse reactions to the proposed models. He expressed his surprise that there was no mention of the ITU in the main report apart from a small footnote. Speaking about the next phase, he said that the intergovernmental process would start and the highlights would be the September prepcom meeting but the negotiations would solely owned by the governments. He also said that the forum was wanted by many but there were several hard issues to be solved. However, he said many governments wanted to put it forward so he felt that it would not die.  

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         There were no questions and discussions.

 

• 7.           AP RALO and the Business Plan by Kuo-Wei-Wu  and At-Large Advisory Committee Activity Report by Izumi Aizu

 

The speaker started the presentation by giving some background information on AP RALO. It started in the early days when ICANN went through electronic voting. The At-Large study committee was formed which later came out with the ALS, At-Large Society. Since then more than 40 members have been registered with the ALS in ICANN and roughly about 10 of them come from the AP region. It follows the ICANN structure. The first AP-RALO pre-meeting took place at Seoul, Korea with approximately 9-10 persons participating. There were also some un-official meetings for AP-RALO in December 2004 and February 2005 during the ICANN Cape Town meeting and the APRICOT Kyoto meeting respectively. The third AP-RALO pre-meeting was to take place during APAN meeting in Taipei in August 2005.

 

The speaker informed that he was assigned to come out with a business plan to be discussed in the third AP-RALO pre-meeting in Taipei. The business plan or the goals that he came up with were:

• Improve ALS communication in AP region and worldwide
• Share experience among ALS members
• Consensus among Internet related issues within ALS members
• Elect representatives for ALAC members for AP region 
• Promote ALS/RALO/ALAC/ICANN in AP region

 

The structure was yet to be decided and the speaker informed that it would be decided in the next meeting, which might take place in Vancouver, Canada. During the second pre-meeting at Luxembourg, four committees were discussed; Steering Committee, Business/Program Committee, Outreach Committee and Funding Committee and NIIEPA (Taiwan) would take the position of the secretariat temporarily. The speaker expressed his desire and hoped to have two face to face meetings in a year. In this regard, he suggested one meeting for ALS in the AP region in conjunction with APRICOT since it was the most popular Internet meeting in the AP region. The other meeting, for worldwide ALS and he wished to have it go with ICANN. A newsletter once in three months, mailing lists and website update were other activities discussed by the speaker. For the outreach program, he expected to have materials on the introduction to ALS/RALO/ALAC/ICANN, its potential, application procedure and approval procedure, how to run ALS in a society, goals and missions defined by the committee and who were the ALS members.

 

The agenda for the pre-meeting in Taipei in august 2005, included review of the business plan, review of worldwide ALS meeting program, review of bylaw/MOU. It would also decide whether it was interesting to introduce the outreach program during the APNIC open policy meeting due in September 2005 in Hanoi. The speaker said that they had great expectations from the ICANN meeting in Vancouver due in November 2005 specially since several issues were to be discussed during the Taipei meeting and if approved, they could begin to organize AP RALO and officially announce the set up of AP RALO. Finally wrapping up his presentation, the speaker presented a list of the members which consisted of At-Large@China, NIIEPA, ISOC Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Pacific, Australia, Nieu, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia and Arabic.

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Mr. Paul asked the speaker if it was likely to have a change in attitude among certain people who were not very happy with the structure of the ICANN At-Large. The speaker acknowledged the dissatisfaction that existed regarding the structure of ICANN At-Large and said that apart from the Asia Pacific and Europe which could, it was unlikely that all of the regions would be able to form RALO organizations. But he also informed that the ICANN was in the process of changing its way and he expressed hope to have some recommendations to change the structure in the next meeting in Vancouver, Canada.
• -         Giving more insight into the ICANN At-Large committee, Mr. Izumi informed that there had been additional members in At-Large since the previous meeting last year and it was somehow becoming more efficient. He also agreed that Europe and Asia Pacific were the most promising to have RALO. In the meantime, he said that they were engaged in many policy development and related activities such as organizing workshops, holding public meetings, participating in strategic plan sessions and releasing statements on policy issues. However, Mr. Izumi acknowledged that they were much away from their own challenges and there were some hard issues which were taking much more time.
• -         Mr. Izumi then threw the question to the attendees asking if they felt there was really a need for ICANN At-Large and welcomed their opinions on it. In response, several comments were delivered with some stating it is very tough for the individuals to understand and get interested about Internet policies and Internet organizations such as the ICANN.  Others felt that in order to be scalable, one has to have a hierarchical structure. However, At-Large was a flat structure.
• -         Professor Kanchana said that the concept of At-Large did not make sense to the public in general. However if they were setting up a model where they have another organization which takes care of other aspects of research community such as security, spam etc, she could consider joining the organization.
• -         After several discussions and opinion sharing, Mr. Izumi said that by individual Internet user, his target was not the average users or the citizens on the streets but professionals, economists, lawyers and public servants who feel that they were responsible for the public interest. He felt that those people should be invited.

 

• 8.           Human Resource Development for Our Community by Hiroshi Esaki and Kanchana Kanchanasut  

 

Since Professor Kanchana already explained the activities of intERLab in the morning session of the retreat which also falls under the human resource development community, she requested Hiroshi Esaki to explain the activities of SOI-Asia. 

 

Introducing the SOI-Asia program, Mr. Esaki explained that SOI-Asia was more than four years old program, setup with the aim of imparting higher education for the Asian countries, share experience and resources. The goal of it was to establish a scheme for sustainable educational collaboration programs utilizing IT among Asian Universities. With the help of a diagram showing the environment for sharing classes among universities (Real-Time and Archives), he informed that they use satellite infrastructure using many new technologies that include RO satellite and UDLR technology, multicast streaming, IPv6 and Satellite Internet over C-band (AI3). SOI-Asia has at present twenty partners in eleven countries. The layered structure of SOI-Asia with the associated responsibilities and activities were also explained by the presenter. Speaking about the bottom-most layer, Network Infrastructure and Development he said that they were collaborating with each other to establish and share the network using students as well as faculty members. The human resource development for network administrations started with SOI-Asia Operators Workshop in Keio/Japan in September 2002 followed by successive workshops in various parts of the Asia Pacific region. The educational environment development included designing portable lecturer site, scalable student site and flexible gateway site. The tools used were MTM-Multicast tree mirroring system, student site monitoring system and activity report system. In partnering with other universities, the speaker felt that establishment of multi-lateral partnership and self-operating organization was very important. Speaking about the achievements, he informed that the steering committee has meetings twice a year with tele-conference when needed. The procedure to share the curriculum includes gathering requests for educational content and agreement on schedules. Apart from the Steering committee, SOI-Asia also has an Academic Committee, Operators Committee and a Research Committee. Briefing on the educational program development and implementation the speaker said that there had been several informative and valuable courses and lectures broadcasted which included special lectures by Nobel Laureates from AIT, APNIC tutorials, Tsunami Special Lecture series contributed by several universities and several other courses and lectures.  

 

Questions and Discussions:

• -         Professor Kanchana thanked the speaker and invited everyone to take part in discussions on how to go forward with human resource development. She felt that a combined infrastructure of both intERLab and SOI-Asia would enable them to conduct all kinds of trainings, workshops and conferences effectively and more efficiently.
• -         Another attendee said the lectures were really focusing on technology rather than policies and Internet governance, and if they could gather people interested only in technology and establish a course to educate students who could participate in Internet governance in the future, it would prove a very good program.
• -          Mr. Izumi expressed his interest and willingness to participate but he stressed that the design should be careful and implementation very focused in such a program in order to have a good understanding of what was going to happen.
• -         Mr. Tommy Matsumoto asked if it was a good idea to provide opportunities and get young people such as those participating in the APNG camp to take part in it.

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