ISPC Trip Assessment 1

ISPCP CROP ASSESSMENT REPORT

Africa Internet Summit (AIS) 2018 – Dakar, Senegal, 4-7 May 2018

by Leonard Obonyo - TESPOK Kenya

The African Internet Summit (AIS) 2018 took place in Dakar, Senegal from 29 April to 11 May 2018. I participated on events during the ICANN Day (which was on Sunday, May 6th), and also the following days took time to meet with the local ISP companies and discuss the role of ISPCP constituency within ICANN and how they can join. Together with other team members on the trip we closely worked with the ICANN Africa regional staff to coordinate these activities.

The meeting brought together all the Af* organizations (AFNOG, AFRINIC, AFTLD, AFREN, AFRALO, Af-IX). These are organizations collaboratively working for a better Internet in Africa. They represent the various sectors of the Internet ecosystem and include Internet Numbers, Policy, Content, Domain Names, Research, Infrastructure, Capacity Building, and Security. 

My colleague Fiona Asonga and I together with Mark Elkins and Herve Clement participated on the ICANN day which took place on 6th May 2018. We made a presentation on the role of ISPCP constituency of ICANN. The presentation covered ISPCP role in policy making, its membership and the current ISPCP issues like operational excellence of the internet and technical issues among other things. The audience included various participants on the ICANN day activities in general and also ISPCP targeted audience like broadband infrastructure, connectivity providers, internet service providers and carrier service providers.

Fiona and I took time to meet with local ISP and other interested participants at the ICANN booth during the ICANN day where I distributed the ISPCP brochures and explained how regional ISPs and connectivity providers can benefit by participating in policy development process and other matters affecting them through the ISPCP constituency of ICANN. Some of the areas I touched on during the meeting included: the ICANN multistakeholder structure model, the evolution of WHOIS and the GDPR update, policies affecting the future operational environment of the Internet, including network neutrality, name collisions and Internet addressing, and finally the TLD universal acceptance concerns of bugs or errors resulting in unintended name blocking. I also talked about the importance of the ISPCP in the internet ecosystem and global participation. I emphasized on the role of ISP and connectivity providers are the first place a customer calls when there is a network problem.

The main purpose of the trip was to strengthen the ISPCP regional membership within Africa, and to increase awareness of the ISPCP's work within the ICANN Community. The participants of AIS 2018 included ISPs and Network and Connectivity providers, to whom we reached out to, and encourage their participation in the upcoming ICANN Meetings and in the activities of the ISPCP Constituency. We had an opportunity to meet one on one with the local ISPs and mobile companies through networking events and explained the structure and activities of ICANN in general, encouraged the regional companies to participate in the development of ICANN's policies and activities through ISPCP constituency. Since, it is through doing so that ICANN can address some of the issues that affect individual Internet users.

There were a number of ISPs and connectivity providers who expressed interest in joining the constituency some of the connectivity providers we interacted with included:

1. Hayo Telecom
2. Tigo
3. Sonatel
4. Orange Mobile
5. Expresso Telecom
6. NIC-MG (Network Information Center-Madagascar)

There is interest from ISPs in the region to participate in the ISPCP however many have a challenge in being able to attend all the ICANN meetings. We have encouraged them to participate in the meetings remotely where remote participation is available. We also encouraged them to participate in the meeting that would be hosted on the continent and explained to them that most of the policy work is done through conference calls; any one of them can get involved voluntarily and participate from wherever they are so long as they have internet connectivity.