WS #19 Satellites, Data, Action: Transforming Tomorrow with Digital

Summary

This discussion focused on the emerging field of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology and its implications for global internet connectivity. The panel explored technical, regulatory, and policy aspects of LEO satellites, highlighting both opportunities and challenges.

Dan York provided an overview of LEO satellite systems, explaining their potential to provide high-speed internet access to remote areas and increase network resilience. He noted the rapid growth of LEO constellations, with companies like SpaceX’s Starlink leading the way. Berna Akcali Gur discussed data governance issues, emphasizing the need for transparency in data use and flow patterns. She highlighted concerns about digital colonialism and the importance of addressing privacy and security issues.

Jane Coffin stressed the importance of a holistic, collaborative approach to assessing and implementing LEO technology, emphasizing the need for feasibility studies and cross-governmental cooperation. Joanna Kulesza addressed cybersecurity concerns, noting the need for risk assessments and the potential for governments to maintain control over these technologies.

The discussion touched on several key challenges, including space debris, environmental impacts, and the potential for LEO satellites to exacerbate the digital divide. Participants also explored the role of multi-stakeholder governance in shaping the future of LEO satellite technology.

Questions from the audience raised issues about competition between private companies and government-led initiatives, as well as the implications of LEO technology for developing regions like Africa. The panel emphasized the need for continued dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders to address these complex issues as LEO satellite technology continues to evolve.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Technical aspects and current state of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet constellations

– Regulatory and policy challenges around LEO satellites, including data governance and cybersecurity

– Potential impacts on developing countries and concerns about digital colonialism

– Need for multi-stakeholder approaches to address challenges

– Environmental and space sustainability concerns

The overall purpose of the discussion was to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by LEO satellite internet constellations from technical, policy, and practical perspectives. The goal was to raise awareness about this emerging technology and its implications, particularly for developing countries.

The tone of the discussion was largely informative and analytical, with speakers providing overviews of different aspects of LEO satellite systems. There was a sense of both excitement about the potential of the technology as well as concern about various risks and challenges. The tone became somewhat more urgent when discussing the need for multi-stakeholder governance approaches and addressing sustainability issues. Overall, the speakers aimed to provide a balanced view of both opportunities and risks.

Speakers

– Dan York: Senior advisor with the Internet Society, technology expert, open internet advocate, author on networking and security topics

– Jane Roberts Coffin: Seasoned executive and internet community expert, experienced in connectivity, infrastructure development, policy and regulatory strategy, and international development

– Akcali Gur Berna (Berna Akcali Gur): Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, Associate Research Fellow at United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies

– Roxana Radu: Associate professor of digital technologies and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

– Kulesza Joanna: Tenured professor of law teaching international law, internet governance and media law at the University of Lodz, Poland

Additional speakers:

– Simon Grasci: From ICTP Italy

– Vladislav Ivanets: Internet Society Youth Ambassador

– Alan Veloso: Technical advisor of international cooperation at the Brazilian Space Agency

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Technology: Opportunities and Challenges

This comprehensive discussion explored the emerging field of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology and its implications for global internet connectivity. The panel, comprising experts from various backgrounds, delved into technical, regulatory, and policy aspects of LEO satellites, highlighting both opportunities and challenges.

Technical Overview and Current State

Dan York, a senior advisor with the Internet Society, provided an overview of LEO satellite systems. He explained their potential to provide high-speed internet access to remote areas and increase network resilience. York described the three main components of a satellite system: satellites, user terminals, and ground stations. He highlighted the rapid growth of LEO constellations, with companies like SpaceX’s Starlink leading the way.

York mentioned the emerging capability of direct-to-device connectivity, which could allow smartphones to connect directly to satellites. He aptly described the current state of LEO satellite technology as “a grand experiment”, acknowledging both the potential and uncertainties surrounding this emerging technology.

Regulatory and Policy Challenges

The discussion revealed a complex landscape of regulatory and policy challenges surrounding LEO satellite technology. Dan York explained that national regulators allocate LEO orbits and frequencies, while Berna Akcali Gur, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, noted that licensing requirements vary by country and business model. The panel highlighted the challenges faced by LEO providers in obtaining regulatory approval across different jurisdictions.

Jane Roberts Coffin, a seasoned executive in internet community development, stressed the importance of a holistic, collaborative approach to assessing and implementing LEO technology. She emphasised the need for feasibility studies and cross-governmental cooperation, stating, “There’s a huge dynamic here with respect to the need for a holistic collaborative approach across the multi-stakeholder ecosystem”.

Data Governance and Cybersecurity

Berna Akcali Gur discussed data governance issues, emphasising the need for transparency in data use and flow patterns. She highlighted concerns about digital colonialism and the importance of addressing privacy and security issues. Gur argued that “if a common understanding of data governance in the context of satellite broadband is to emerge, transparency in data use and flow patterns of this technology will be essential”.

Joanna Kulesza, a professor of law at the University of Lodz, addressed cybersecurity concerns, noting the need for risk assessments and the potential for governments to maintain control over these technologies. She also mentioned the potential impact of quantum computing on LEO services, introducing an important future consideration for the field.

Global Competition and Development

The panel explored the competitive landscape of LEO satellite development. Dan York mentioned Europe’s IRIS-2 project, a government-backed initiative to develop a European LEO constellation for autonomy and security. Berna Akcali Gur provided additional context on the IRIS-2 project, highlighting its importance for European strategic independence.

York also noted the challenges faced by competitors in launching their own satellites due to SpaceX’s dominance in the launch market, adding another dimension to the competitive landscape.

Jane Roberts Coffin discussed the potential impact of LEO technology on developing regions, particularly Africa. She suggested that LEO could provide connectivity options for the continent, while also emphasising the need for feasibility assessments for countries considering LEO adoption. Coffin mentioned the potential role of development financial institutions in funding LEO projects and discussed the importance of integrating LEO systems with existing infrastructure, such as internet exchange points in Africa.

Environmental and Space Sustainability Concerns

Environmental impacts and space sustainability emerged as significant concerns in the discussion. Dan York mentioned issues around space debris, satellite de-orbiting, and the impact of LEO satellites on astronomy. He also noted the potential effects of space weather on LEO satellite systems. Alan Veloso, a technical advisor at the Brazilian Space Agency, raised a crucial dilemma, asking, “How can we assure the universality of connection, of connectivity, and at the same time guarantee that we are not polluting our atmosphere, that we are following some guidelines that are addressing sustainability issues?”

Multi-stakeholder Governance and Future Directions

The discussion emphasised the need for continued dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders to address the complex issues surrounding LEO satellite technology. Joanna Kulesza suggested that the traditional multi-stakeholder model may not fully apply to LEO decisions, indicating a need for new governance approaches.

The panel identified several unresolved issues and areas for future focus, including:

1. Effective global regulation of LEO satellite networks

2. Long-term environmental impacts of large satellite constellations

3. Ensuring equitable access to LEO technology for developing countries

4. Addressing cybersecurity risks associated with LEO networks

5. Balancing national security/sovereignty concerns with open internet principles

6. Exploring business models and economic viability of different LEO initiatives

7. Integrating LEO technology with existing terrestrial infrastructure

8. Addressing the challenges of licensing and regulatory approval across jurisdictions

Conclusion

The discussion on LEO satellite technology revealed a landscape filled with both promise and challenges. While LEO satellites offer significant potential for expanding global connectivity, especially to remote areas and in disaster relief situations, they also present complex regulatory, environmental, and governance challenges. The panel’s insights highlighted the need for a multi-stakeholder, collaborative approach to address these issues effectively as LEO satellite technology continues to evolve.

As the field progresses, ongoing research, dialogue, and policy development will be crucial to balance the benefits of expanded connectivity with concerns about digital colonialism, environmental sustainability, and cybersecurity. The future of LEO satellite technology will likely depend on the ability of stakeholders to navigate these complex issues collaboratively and transparently, while also considering the unique needs and challenges faced by developing countries in accessing and implementing this technology.

Dan York: I know in the speaking order, it had me first, followed by Berna, followed by Jane. Rox, Roxanna, are you going to be showing any slides to begin the session or anything? Nope.

Roxana Radu: No slides, no.

Dan York: Okay. So it’ll, the first slides will be, will be me and then it will be Berna. Okay. And then, um, is that Jane?

Jane Roberts Coffin: It is Jane. Jane doesn’t have slides.

Dan York: That’s okay, Jane. You’re looking very spooky there with your background.

Jane Roberts Coffin: It’s very early, right? It’s too early.

Dan York: Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s okay. Um, okay. Huge dedication to the IGF. Oh, oh God, Jane, yes, you’re right. So it’s so late there. Um, thank you, Jane.

Jane Roberts Coffin: That’s all right. It’s normal.

Dan York: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then, all right. So then, yes, I’m talking to the, so I’ll be the first one showing slides. And then, um, when I’m done, we’ll then go to Berna, who’s on there and she will then share some slides. Uh, Berna, could you try sharing now? Okay, there we see what’s there.

Akcali Gur Berna: Is it working? I think it is.

Dan York: We’re seeing it on Zoom. He’s just working to get it up on the, on the main, uh, screen in the front. That’s me, yes. After I’m there. Yep. I’ll just. No, no, no, no, no. So I’ll just do my part and then I’ll be done. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. So then do I, can that clicker work for me? Okay. Oh yeah, it needs to be in the back there. We’re just getting a clicker set up. that for me here. Yeah, and then just do that, yeah. Okay, and then it. Yep, it’s working. Okay. All right, that works good.

Akcali Gur Berna: Okay, so I stop sharing?

Dan York: Yep. Okay. All right, so, Roxana, or, do you, are you gonna be introducing the session?

Roxana Radu: Yes, I’ll be introducing the session, introducing the speakers, and then I’ll give you the floor.

Dan York: Okay, sounds good.

Roxana Radu: I won’t do a very long introduction, so feel free to add more details in your presentations if you want. I didn’t want to preclude anything that you might want to say, but I’ll tell them a little bit about the run of show and then hopefully we have an engaging discussion towards the end.

Dan York: Sounds good, and like I’ve done in past times when we’ve done this together with Berna, I’m doing, I’ve got some kind of the, like setting the groundwork for what satellites, for the satellite situation and the pieces there, and then I’ll kind of go through some of that. So in my allotted 10 minutes or whatever we’re asking people to do. Yeah, 10 to 12 would be excellent.

Roxana Radu: I think you can take maybe up to 15, no more than that.

Dan York: Well, I will keep it to that.

Roxana Radu: Excellent.

Dan York: I can adjust to whatever.

Roxana Radu: And Dan, can I ask kindly for your help with any questions from the room? Because I won’t be able to point to anybody.

Dan York: Yeah.

Jane Roberts Coffin: And for all of you, don’t be surprised that I will give a disclaimer that I’m speaking in my personal capacity, not in.

Dan York: Okay.

Jane Roberts Coffin: I have to do that for ethics clearance.

Roxana Radu: Right. And Jane, I’ll just introduce you as a seasoned expert and so on, I will not mention any affiliation. You can bring it in if you want, but it’s up to you.

Jane Roberts Coffin: Yeah, they were keen that I didn’t over-highlight it, and I said, don’t worry.

Roxana Radu: That’s fine. That’s fine. All right.

Jane Roberts Coffin: I’m also new, so.

Roxana Radu: Okay. Yeah, no, that’s. Yeah.

Dan York: Channel four. Okay. Okay. This is a silent one. Hearing only with the headset. Ah, okay, okay. Okay, good, all right. All right, interesting. Little side detail. Everybody here has to wear headsets.

Jane Roberts Coffin: It was like that in Baku, Dan. I think they have every room is on a different frequency. Is that right?

Roxana Radu: Yeah, I think it might be the case. The other sessions I attended had the same requirements, so yeah.

Jane Roberts Coffin: Yeah, that was 2012.

Roxana Radu: There is an open ceiling, so.

Jane Roberts Coffin: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Roxana Radu: A lot of background noise, yeah.

Jane Roberts Coffin: Yeah, interesting.

Dan York: Who has to wear headsets, so there we are. Yeah. People are listening, because they’re hearing our conversations right now.

Roxana Radu: Let us know when we can get started. I think we’re keen to start.

Dan York: Oh, we can go.

Roxana Radu: We can start?

Dan York: We’ll wait to see. Are you good to, oh yeah, you can get going.

Roxana Radu: Oh, wonderful. Good morning, everyone. Good morning and welcome to our session entitled Satellites, Data, Action, Transforming Tomorrow with Digital. My name is Roxana Radu and I’m an associate professor of digital technologies and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. It’s a great pleasure to moderate this round table on the role of low Earth orbit satellites, data governance and infrastructure governance. And we’ll look at how this drives part of the social economic change and development that we’re seeing in particular in conflict areas. This session is closely aligned with the sub-theme of enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development and sustainability and benefits from the endorsement of the global academic network. Network on Internet Governance, Giganet, and presents some of the results of two projects supported by Internet Society. It has been convened by Professor Jona Kulesza from the University of Lodz and the Lodz Cyber Hub, who will be joining us online as soon as she can. Unfortunately, she has a conflict in her schedule. That is why you will see me here instead of her. We’ll discuss today some of the key challenges and opportunities associated with low Earth orbit or LEO satellite solutions, including the developmental angle as well as the data sovereignty angle. We have three objectives for this session. The first one is to facilitate a broader conversation around this emerging field and also the global implications based on multi-stakeholder perspectives. Second, to zoom in on the challenges and opportunities in conflict areas, promoting sustainable development and peace building with digital technologies. And thirdly, to sketch out a set of policy recommendations that can hopefully drive more of the dialogue in this space and support policymakers with some of their decisions at both the national and international levels. So we have the following plan for this session. We have three amazing speakers with us today and we’ll give them the floor very shortly to lead on a particular aspect that they want to focus on for about 12 minutes to lead the discussion on that. And then we’ll take any clarification questions shortly after, give everybody one or two minutes for immediate questions. Then we will open the conversation for. an interactive discussion. We’re hoping to get your inputs as well as other questions and comments from the speakers themselves. So we’ll have this moderated discussion for the remaining time and we’re hoping to bring out not only regional experiences but also some of the global implications for these developments. Without further ado, I’ll give the floor to our first speaker, Dan York, who is on site. Luckily, he managed to do this trip to Riyadh. Unfortunately, some of us were not as lucky as he was, so we will be joining online. So Dan is a technology expert and open internet advocate, author of many books on networking, security, IPv6, Linux, and we can go on. He is currently serving as senior advisor with the Internet Society and he has been directly involved in leading a particular project back in 2022 on low-Earth orbit satellites. So we’ll give him the floor for the opening remarks and then we’ll move on to our two other speakers that are joining us online, one of them in London and the other one in the US, and I’ll give you more details shortly. Dan, you have the floor. Thank you, Roxana, and thank you, everybody.

Dan York: Oops, I’m loud. Oh, well, then I can’t hear any comments they make. Oh, and I’m falling apart. Okay, so my name is Dan York. I work for the Internet Society and I’m going to kind of start by talking a little bit about what are low-Earth orbit satellites and some terminology that we’ll be using throughout the rest of the presentation that we have today. So if this works, let’s see. Oh, it’s not advancing here, let’s see. This did just work. Let’s see. Sorry folks, we’re just experiencing a difficulty with the it was just working when we tested it a minute ago. … … … … Okay, we’re just going to try switching to a different machine. Okay, it did work here. It did work here just a minute ago. Oh, you might need to get to PowerPoint on here for PowerPoint to focus. … Okay, now let’s try it. Sorry folks, we’re just getting back to it. Okay, now let me try it. … Oh, there we go. Perfect. Okay. Alright, there we are. So, I just wanted to begin by talking a little bit about the power that we see in low Earth orbit satellites and whether it’s Starlink or OneWeb or some of these different systems. … There we go. So, this was an example, a picture that I’m showing here from a community network that was built up in the northwest territories of Canada far up in the Arctic area where they had no capability to go and get any other kind of subsea cable or anything like that. And so what they did was they used a connection through Starlink to be able to connect in and be able to share that connection with everyone else that was there. In the United States, most recently, we had some large hurricanes that came through our area. And as part of the disaster response, organizations were using, again, in this case, Starlink, to be able to go and help coordinate disaster response and work with us. They also set up wireless charging stations. They did other things like this. Similarly, in that same area, they were using OneWeb, another constellation, to go and provide 5G connectivity to people in the local area. These are just some of the many examples around how this can be truly life-changing in so many different kinds of ways that people have. The subject we’re talking about today is really around these Low Earth Orbit Satellites, or LEOs. And I want to just put a couple of pieces of terminology in here. If you look at the Earth and the orbits that are out there, the traditional satellites that we’ve used for the last 50 years or so are all out way at the very end in something called geosynchronous orbit, which is abbreviated as GEO, or sometimes GSO. And it is out at 36,000 kilometers away from the Earth. And that’s where all the satellites are that do a lot of the broadcast TV, a lot of the communications broadcast. All of that is happening out there. And that’s been the space where it all goes and has for so many years. The challenge is that it takes a really long time for a signal to get all the way out there and come back. It takes around 600-plus milliseconds, which would mean that we can’t do a Zoom call over that kind of connection. It’s a very long time. Things like video calls start to end around 150 milliseconds or so. So it takes a long time to get out there and get back. So this is why people have started to do stuff in what’s called medium Earth orbit, which is in the middle. and low earth orbit, which is what we’re going to talk about here. Now, what happens though, is that if you do something out at the geosynchronous area, you can use like three satellites to connect around to get global coverage. But when you start going in lower, you need more. There’s a couple of providers that have about 20 satellites in the medium earth orbit. And then as you get down into the low earth orbit, which is under 2,000 kilometers, you get into needing hundreds to then thousands of satellites as you have with Starlink right now. So there’s three parts to a satellite system. One is the satellites, the constellation, as we call it, of all the satellites that are there. There’s also the user terminal, the antenna, the dish, the thing that you’re using there. And then there is also the ground stations that connect these constellations to the rest of the internet. There are policy implications around all three of these different things, and they all come into play in different ways. So in a typical system, what happens is you go and you are connecting from your dish up to the satellite network and back down to a ground station and out to the public internet. And this is what a picture typically looks like, but because these satellites are moving so fast, you might only see one in the sky for about five minutes. It actually looks maybe a little bit more like this, where your signals are actually bouncing off multiple satellites as they’re traveling around. And this is one of the innovations that happened in this space. But then there was even a little bit more of an innovation, which is that what if you’re not near a ground station? You’re not, you’re not able to go and connect to one easily. This is where you might hear about space lasers and stuff like this. This is truly where we are connecting across the constellation to be able to go and have your, your traffic go across the constellation and then drop down to a ground station somewhere else. Again, though, this will have some policy implications as you start looking at this in terms of, well, where is that ground station located? Where is that? Who’s, who’s got sovereignty over that? Who’s got control? control over that. Where is it? You’re going across different borders, different things like this. So this is all part of what we’re seeing in this environment. As Roxanna mentioned, back in 2022, the Internet Society created a document. You can get it at internetsociety.org slash leos, L-E-O-S. You can get this document, which outlines a lot of the issues and things that have happened. But a lot has happened in two years. It’s amazing to think of what’s going on. The biggest one is that right now there have been 7,500, and this number’s actually probably wrong because it was from last week, and there’s probably been a couple of Starlink launches since then. I actually haven’t looked. But there’s almost 7,000 satellites just by one company right now up in space that are operating in this kind of thing. Amazing just to see what is happening around this. We’re also seeing a lot of innovation. I don’t know if… I was at a conference recently where somebody just pulled out one of these Starlink mini dishes, and he just had it in his backpack, just like a laptop. He just pulled it out, set it up, and he had Starlink connectivity. Amazing the way that we’ve changed the dynamics of being able to get this kind of access. I’m a little bit too frugal to go in. I don’t want to spend the amount of money to the monthly subscription fee, but it’s pretty cool. If somebody wanted to give me a gift, I’d love one. But it’s like, that’s not something I would do, but it’s very cool to see what’s happening in this kind of space. There’s also… People are using this for all sorts of roaming, off-grid capabilities. This, again, you’re getting into some policy things, because people are just able to go put this on their car, drive wherever, do whatever, and go into whatever jurisdiction, wherever they kind of are. From a technical point of view, they could get connectivity anywhere in the world. We’ll talk about some of the legal aspects of that in a few minutes that are there. There’s also… We’re seeing it now for in-flight connectivity. Many of the airlines are looking, they often have had contracts with the geosynchronous providers. And now, because of the higher speed and lower latency, because they’re that much closer to the earth, you can have latency speeds of down like 50 milliseconds. So you can do Zoom calls, you can do streaming video, you can do all these kinds of things. So increasingly, we’re seeing airlines doing it. We’re seeing new economic models. In some parts of the world, we’re seeing people renting out Starlink dishes. They’re renting out other kinds of things. They’re doing other creative ways to get these in the hands of people in some form. We’re resilience in the shape of disaster relief in having additional connectivity. It doesn’t necessarily have the same capacity as for instance, a subsea cable does. Subsea cables are often in gigabits to terabits of capacity. And these are more in the hundreds of megabits connection that you’d have here. But you are seeing this kind of resilience that the people are looking for. So you’re also seeing some people just going and buying a whole bunch of dishes. The state of Maine, which is near where I live in the United States, just went out and is buying a whole bunch of these dishes to go connect people in very remote communities where there’s no connectivity. Because part of it is you pay a fee for the dish and then you pay a monthly subscription fee. So they’re doing some work like this to go and do this kind of thing that’s happening. You’re also seeing, and this is the big disruptor that’s coming right now, is that these services are starting to offer direct to device. So you don’t need that dish, you could just use your cell phone. And you’re seeing this happening in the United States. Starlink SpaceX has been working with T-Mobile to provide this connectivity. And they need to get permission to use spectrum to communicate with these phones. They also need to equip their satellites with the radios that will transmit over the spectrum, but they’re doing that. They’ve been launching. satellites with this. They just got approval last month to go and turn on a trial of the connectivity in the United States to do this. They’re working with other telecom companies around the world, and other telecom companies are working with other providers. Vodafone here in Europe just signed a deal with another company called AST Space Mobile that’s putting up satellites. So this will be direct to your device without the need of a satellite dish, and it would give you telecom and also internet connectivity. So a very different model. It’s being fought, of course, by all of the incumbent telecoms, by the other mobile providers who are not, who don’t have those relationships. But this is, from a policy point of view, this is something that’s happening. It’s already happening in some spaces. There’s some islands out in the Pacific that already have this enabled through another provider. All of this is going on. The other part that’s happening is you’re seeing some more launching of more satellite systems. You know, China has started to launch their equivalent of Starlink. Well, they have two different constellations they may be launching, but they’re looking to launch about 10,000 to 15,000 satellites into each of these that’s going on. So you’re seeing a lot of these different things happening. I mentioned some of the policy challenges along the way, but one is that each of these constellations has to go through a set of approvals. And it goes, this is a curious part, and we talk about the multi-stakeholder model and how all this works and the pieces. There’s actually nobody in charge of where, of who gets to put LEO satellites where. The ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, tracks the geo-stationary satellites. They allocate slots for geo-satellites because due to some physics and other stuff, there’s around 1,400 spots that you could have around the earth. So the ITU allocates that, but they don’t allocate. LEO orbits and slots. Instead, what happens is each national telecom regulator goes and allocates the altitudes and frequencies, et cetera, and then that all bubbles up to the ITU for kind of record keeping and coordination. But it’s an interesting aspect of the current world that all of these things are launching, but they’re all under the kind of the national regulators who are sort of agreeing with each other on what’s going to happen. So we’re all, it’s all a grand experiment. Then those user terminals, they have to be approved for use within the country through typical consumer equipment kind of, you know, policies and pieces like that. And in these ground stations, you need to have permission to go and connect down to a ground station to go back out to the internet in some form. All of these things need permitting and need licensing and all this, which is why you’ve seen, for instance, OneWeb, which is another constellation that was now it’s owned by a company called Eutelsat in the EU, but they have their satellites up there already, but they’re struggling to provide connectivity because they don’t have the licenses for ground connectivity. So there are people at these organizations whose job it is just to go into each country and try to negotiate with the regulator what kind of, you know, relationship, what will you be able to do? And often in many countries, the incumbent telecom companies are fighting this because they don’t want the competition. And so they’re pushing back and making it challenging for some of these systems to go on. A couple other different things that are happening in this space is next. Okay. Let’s see if we can, what, it’s not, we’re not advancing again. I think we have to have focus on that. Okay. Yep. Oh, okay. The other big thing that’s the challenge that’s happening right now for the space is that there’s only one company that is consistently launching satellites, and that’s SpaceX launching rockets. So far this year, they’ve launched over 120 Falcon 9 rockets that have had their satellites on them. The other competitors in the space, such as Ariane Space, they’ve only launched one rocket this year. ULA has launched one, which is United Launch Alliance. Blue Origin has not launched a rocket yet. So the challenge that this whole space has, quite literally, is that there’s only one company that’s actually getting the rockets up there. And this is a challenge because all of these other providers are, they have no way to get their satellites up in the space. So I’m gonna just kind of talk a little bit about there’s some resilience questions. There’s a lot of spectrum kind of issues happening that are going on around, and you’ll see about WRC, the World Radio Telecommunications Congress. There’s a lot of these issues around spectrum sharing, what goes on. There’s also the ITU has some standards that are going on that they’re looking at. So there’s a lot of different things happening within the UN space. And we also, one of the questions we had here was about access during, in regions of warfare or restrictions or things like this or shutdowns. Technically, you could go and turn on this kind of access anywhere in the world. Legally, you can’t. It’s, there’s treaties, et cetera, that all do this. Now, sometimes that can be ignored in some cases. Recently, SpaceX, or last year, they had turned on the internet access over Iran. Iran did not let them do that, but they did anyway, out of pressure from other organizations and pieces so that people could be able to use it. Well, that created, Iran, of course, has filed complaints within the. and ITU and other spaces. But this is a space where it’s a challenge with that. The other challenge is that if you’re using these systems, they transmit. And so you can’t just, you know, they can be seen by other people. They can be found. So it’s not like just a passive observer. It’s actually doing that. So I think I wanna wrap it up here with just a final piece to say, there’s a host of other things. There’s space debris that’s going on right now. There’s environmental issues. We have real questions around all of these satellites have about a five-year lifespan. And so then they burn up in the upper atmosphere. We’re not quite sure whether that’s a good thing or not. When you’re at some point, when we reach capacity, we’ll have maybe 40 or 50 of these burning up a day in the upper atmosphere. I don’t know. We don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing or something. So all of these and the rocket launches associated with that. There’s a big impact on astronomy. These can block a lot of the different, some of these systems are huge. You’ll see a picture here. This is about the size of a, in their new configuration. If you think of a basketball court, if you know that about half the size of that is what one of these satellites will be. So they’re pretty huge. So they go and cover a lot in that. So there’s astronomy concerns, there’s climate or environmental concerns, there’s space weather. There’s a lot of other different questions that we have around this. And the main piece is that these are things that we all have to figure out. And I’ll leave you with a final note, which is just to say that there’s a lot of people who want to launch into LEO right now. And let me get to, let me just give you this one chart here to end. There’s, I think if I read this correctly, at the moment there are plans for about 555,000 satellites that people have suggested that they would launch. Not all of those. are going to happen, right? OK, you’ve got to manufacture them. You’ve got to launch them. You’ve got to do all that. But the point is, there’s a lot of people who want to get into this game, want to be able to provide this access. There’s all sorts of different countries playing in this, lots of different places. So it’s a big space, and a lot’s going on in that. And I will leave you with one aspect, which is to say that with the new US administration and the proximity of Elon Musk to what’s going on with the new administration, I’m expecting that a lot of what they’re looking at will be greenlit. They’ll get to go ahead to go and do it, which will mean SpaceX will probably launch. It has plans for 30,000, possibly 40,000 satellites that will be going up, and some other pieces, and much more of this directed device. So with that, I’m going to say thank you very much. And we can stop sharing this screen and give it over to the next presenter.

Roxana Radu: Thank you very much, Dan, for this wonderful presentation. I’m wondering if there are any clarification questions, either in the room or online. We can allocate about a minute to anything that needs to be clarified.

Dan York: Are there any questions here that people have before we go on? I’m not seeing.

Roxana Radu: I’ll just say that we can summarize all of this as it’s all a grand experiment, in your own words. It’s something I’m going to use in the future. It’s all a grand experiment. As you were saying, there’s huge potential for connectivity innovation, but also a high concentration in the market. There are questions related to standards, to the danger of potentially weaponizing this technology. There are environmental concerns, as well as concerns around issues we haven’t explored fully yet, from astronomy to bird behavior, and so on and so forth. And with about half a million LEO satellites in the making. we can absolutely see this rising up on the policy agenda. So we’ll now turn to an academic perspective.

Dan York: Sorry. One second, Roxana. We do have a question here in the room. So let me give this to somebody here.

Simon Grasci: Yeah, this is Simon Grasci from ICTP Italy. I had just one question. I really like your presentation, but one kind of aspect that I’m actually wondering about is what will happen with these remote communities? Because if they will start to rely on this connectivity, let’s say, you know, one day something bad happens and, you know, we get a bunch of space debris, all these things falls down. I mean, what worries me that, you know, governments might have, you know, less incentive to kind of start to build and deploy and push the connectivity to this really remote area. So I’m kind of just wondering about your perspective on this.

Dan York: Yes, and that’s one of our concerns is just that they’re like, you know, this is truly can be, especially for the remote communities, this can be truly life changing. You know, we’ve got any number of stories of people who have been able to go and participate in the modern world through this. But yes, if we become very reliant on that, and we don’t have any other way to provide that connectivity, then if there is some kind of major issue with space debris or with solar weather, space weather, we don’t understand all of the aspects there, then it could become a situation where all of a sudden we’re losing that. So there is this warning that it’s awesome. We can get great connectivity out of this, but we have to think about the fact that if it’s the only path, and one of the worst cases we could see is that if these, the systems are currently being deployed, you have the biggest players are SpaceX, okay, with Starlink. They’re the biggest one. Then you have Eutelsat with their OneWeb constellations up there now. Then you have Jeff Bezos’ Amazon with their Project Kuiper, which they’re trying to get launched, but they’re building the satellites. They’re doing all that. They’re going to have one that’s the size of SpaceX, Starlink right now and that kind of thing. So you’ll have a number of Western companies that are primarily controlling this space. And it is a question if they wind up, if we wind up with a lot of terrestrial internet service providers winding up losing out on profitability, and we’re all using space-based internet, and it’s in the control of a few corporations and maybe a couple governments, the EU just announced they’re going to launch their, they got a plan to put together some by 2030 or so. So, yeah, that is a concern we have. Now, I mean, the reality is right now, even if they’re in low orbit, you still get better speed and lower latency out of fiber. So if you can get fiber connections, you’re going to get higher speed and also a synchronics that will be both download and upload and a lower latency. So that’s kind of your best case. But you know what? There’s also people in many parts of the world who found that their fiber infrastructure was wiped out in floods or other things like that. And so some of those folks are saying, hey, maybe I should have something startling for backup or something like that. But it is a question. And I think it’s a global concern that we need to make sure that as much as we embrace this for some things, we make sure we have other plans too. Yes. Roxanna, just tell me when I need to end the questions.

Roxana Radu: Sorry, this is fast. I wanted to say yes. And also the concern that if these are like private companies that governments as they move towards e-government are building systems around and then somebody decides to turn off the internet or they’re also providing service to like a country that they’re having issues with, that’s also very interesting.

Dan York: Yes. Who’s in control of the internet access? Go ahead.

Audience: Okay. Mine is on ground stations. Yes. For this kind of system, one ground station can cover even a continent. What will be the impact on? on internet exchange points and the original intended need to monitor traffic?

Dan York: So, yeah, good question. So one interesting aspect is that some of these ground stations are in fact being located near internet exchange points because you are able to connect into all of those different networks. If you’re not aware, an internet exchange point is where a whole bunch of other networks interconnect and agree to share traffic. So that’s what an IXP is. It’s a place where they all join together often with just shared peering agreements and that kind of thing. Sometimes these ground stations are being located near data centers so that you can be able to have quick access to cloud computing or to other kinds of capabilities that are there. But your second point comes in, and this is where some governments are being, if it’s going to somewhere else, then who is in control of the monitoring or whatever is going on? And so some governments who want to monitor or impose certain monitoring around that are reluctant to open up to these systems because they want to have control over what is seen in their country and that type of thing. Now, we don’t know what the licensing agreements are because that’s all not available in the public, but there is certainly a speculation that if I’m going to be approved, if I’m a LEO provider and I’m going to be approved to operate in the country, the country may impose certain requirements on the use of spectrum that say, you must have a ground station in my country or something like that. You know, again, one challenge is we don’t know a lot of what happens. It’s a kind of a black box. We know that TCP IP packets go into the Starlink network and they come out the other side. What happens in the middle and all that, we don’t know. It’s a lot of mystery around that because it’s a private network basically. Yes. Thank you.

Audience: Thank you for your presentation. It was very informative. First question is basically regarding the capacity because we saw some of the deployment and it was limited to 100 something megabit per second. If we are assuming having large island, then this 100 megabit per second will not be enough for them to operate. Maybe if we increase the number of satellite, then we’ll increase the capacity. This is the first question. The second one is basically regarding the business model, how it would be in the future. So do, for example, Starlink going to operate their services with local operators, mobile operators, or they will do it by their own and spreading all the internet connectivity all over the world, and I don’t know what will be happening in the future, so are we getting rid of these mobile operators?

Dan York: So Roxanne, I’ll wrap up with that one there, and the AV gentleman, if we could stop sharing that screen that’s up there, that would be great, so that the next person could come up with that. So the two questions, one on the capacity, this is actually why Starlink, SpaceX is in the process of trying to launch more satellites, because right now they have about 7,000 satellites that are up there right now, but they’re looking to go to, they want to grow to 42,000 satellites, their filings right now, largely so that they can be able to provide more capacity and higher bandwidth and all of that. They’re also looking to bring some satellites a little bit closer to the earth, down almost into the very low earth orbit area, so they’ll be able to get lower latency and higher capacity, and the third aspect is that when they get their starship, their large rocket to be able to launch things, they’re going to be launching what they call their V3 satellites, which will have a much higher, they’ll be larger, and they’ll have a higher capacity and higher ability to go and do this. So they’re looking to dramatically grow that infrastructure. As far as that business model one, that’s one of the open questions, because for instance, Starlink has very much a direct-to-consumer model, and that’s been their model. In some places they are working with mobile operators in some places, and especially now for the direct-to-dial component that’s there. Other providers like OneWeb are primarily working with mobile and other retailers and others, so their business model is more of a wholesale working with that. Like I said. a grand experiment. We don’t know how this is all going to end. So it’s going to be a lot of interesting times ahead of us. Over to you, Roxanne. Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to see

Roxana Radu: such a vivid conversation in the room already. And many of your questions already touched upon governance challenges. And this is what we are going to address with our second speaker now. Dr. Bela Bernamt Akalib Gur is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and an Associate Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies within the Digital Governance Cluster. Berna, you have the floor.

Berna Akcali Gur: Thank you, Roxanne. You can see my PowerPoints and hear my voice. Yes, it’s all well. Okay, so good morning from London. And thank you very much for the kind introduction and for moderating this panel. Now, it is always a privilege to contribute to the IGF. Of course, it’s much better when it can be in person. But this year, unfortunately, I cannot be there due to conflicting personal commitments. Nevertheless, I am glad to continue our discussion on satellite broadband from an internet governance perspective at IGF 2024 as well. Now, as we all know, satellite technology is not new. Telstar 1 was the first active communication satellite, and it was launched all the way back in 1962. Now, many more had been launched since then. However, with the emergence of mega constellations, and the broadband quality connectivity they offer, there’s a renewed discussion on a wide range of issues relevant to this technology. Now, some of the most urgent questions overlap with the contemporary debates on internet infrastructures and the current geoeconomic and geopolitical tensions. Now, one company, Starlink, the undisputed current leader in this domain, ignited these discussions. There isn’t any strong competition yet, so most of what we discussed is based on its very short past. Okay, so… Going back, okay. Now, I have been working on a research project focused intensively on international law and policy aspects of satellite broadband since the beta testing days of Starlink, which was a bit longer than three years ago. Now, many in the industry in those days, they were asking whether this time, this project could be realized, because in the past, in the 90s, other mega constellations were planned. Teledesic was the most famous. It had promised to provide fiber-like connectivity, and the project was abandoned only for commercial reasons. Around the early 2000s, a lot of constellation projects had gone bankrupt, so the early investors in Teledesic, they just decided not to go ahead. And one of the main investors in this project, maybe of interest to the audience online, was a Saudi Arabian company. Anyway, so it has been possible for us to conduct this extensive and long project with Joanna Colessa, my research partner, Roxana mentioned, with the funding and support of the International Society Foundation. So when Joanna joins us, maybe she can talk a bit more about what. we had done so far. But today I will present my, I will limit my presentation to only one aspect of this project, which is data governance. And it is one of the two issues we receive most questions on. If you’re wondering what the other question, what the other group of question is, it is the environmental risks of these constellations posed to the low Earth orbit environment and the Earth. Just as Dan mentioned, it is a very important topic, but I will not talk about it today. But I have to say, I want to mention that we take that issue very seriously. And we propose in our research that all decisions concerning societal, economic and political benefits of this technology to be balanced against its adverse impact on environment, space safety, orbital sustainability, and astronomical impact. Now, if you want to learn more about what we had said on these issues, and some other questions, please visit our website. Now, Dan gave a good explanation of, of mega constellations and the orbits, but I just want to say that the low Earth orbit is a very valuable, but limited natural resource. And why is it valuable because of its proximity. And because it is, as I said, a limited natural resource. Now it is utilized not only for mega by mega constellations, but other satellite services, including Earth observation and scientific research, the famous International Space Station is there. So because of the ITU’s first come first serve system, and with the emergence of these mega constellations, the available space for the newcomers is shrinking fast. education, all the countries that have the financial, technical, and industrial capacity are rushing to put their constellations in this domain. And so this competition is a big aspect of the mega constellation discussion. Okay. Now, again, Dan’s talk and mine overlap a little bit, but I would like to mention the legal definition of the mega constellations. Now, we know now that constellations consist of multiple identical or similar satellites designed to operate as a network through shared control for a common purpose. And SpaceX has been very successful not only because of its launching capabilities, but also because of its mass manufacturing capabilities. So in response to this exponential increase in satellite filings and satellite deployments in the LEO, the International Telecommunications Union also updated its regulations in 2019 and provided for the first time a legal definition for LEOs. This is the only international law definition that exists, so I would like to read it. Constellation applies to all non-geostationary satellite systems having more than one orbited plane where the mutual relative position of each orbital plane and each satellite within its plane is important. It means that all these satellites, they work together as one system. Okay. So what inspired us to do this project? It was pure fascination and hope. We knew that infrastructure development stood in the way of closing the global digital divide within and between countries, and we knew that we needed to do something about it. In some regions, there was no business case to invest in terrestrial infrastructures, whether because these regions were sparsely populated or located in inhospitable terrain. So minimizing the need for terrestrial infrastructure seemed the perfect solution in these areas. There is also the case for increasing the resilience of existing infrastructures in times of conflict or natural disaster. We have already seen a few examples of this in the last three and a half years. So the first step for us was to see whether the domestic and international governance systems were conducive to the use of the Benga constellations by the communities on the wrong side of the digital divide. We have to remember that the developing world has a legitimate interest in broadband connectivity to stay abreast with the rapidly changing digital ecosystem. In recognition of its enabling role for all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, connectivity has sometimes been referred to as Sustainable Development Goal Zero. Now, the Digital Acceleration Agenda recently corroborated this claim, indicating that 70 percent of all 119 Sustainable Development Goal targets will benefit from connectivity. With a view to supporting satellite broadband technology to serve the best interests of the developing world, we analyzed whether the legal frameworks applicable to satellite broadband service providers to see if they were fit for this new infrastructure and to see whether they address the problems that we associate with cross-border Internet connectivity. Now, what are these regulatory frameworks? Any company offering satellite services must obtain landing rights from each jurisdiction in which they want to provide their services. So if Starlink intends to provide services in the United Kingdom, it has to go to the UK authorities. These licenses and permissions can change from country to country and will depend on the business model of each service provider. Does it want to provide services directed to consumers? Does it want to provide services to existing telecom service providers? Does it want to install a ground station but nothing else? The range of licenses, the cost and the requirements will change for each business model and each country. And each state is free to decide this for themselves as long as these frameworks do not contradict the international commitments they have undertaken. So the spectrum assignments should conform to the ITU radio regulations whereas the importation of user terminals will be expected to conform to its commitments under its bilateral regional or international trade agreements. Now data privacy and data security are among these concerns and a foreign service provider is expected to comply with the requirements of domestic authorities. In its broadest sense data security focuses on maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of data and protecting against threats like unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification and destruction. Data privacy on the other hand involves the ability to share data consensually with clear expectations about the context and scope of sharing. Both concepts are fundamentally linked to privacy, personal data protection and intellectual property. So they also relate to internet access as a right as meaningful access requires secure connections and safe navigation. Now digital data security and privacy are perceived to have a cross-border dimension. In response to the growing cyber risks and threats countries worldwide have implemented domestic regulatory measures that govern digital data flows, collection, storage, processing, often requiring data localization. Now, global companies that control and access data must comply with these regulations. Satellite broadband service providers are not exempt from domestic requirements and must adhere to the regulations of the countries that they operate. I’m sharing the privacy page from Starlink’s website. As you can see, there are additional links for the EU, the UK, Mexico, and Brazil. It has recently been reported that they agreed with India’s data localization requirements as well. When you look at the availability map, these are not the only jurisdictions in which Starlink has been able to obtain landing rights. The others are either content with the general privacy commitments of the company and do not require jurisdiction-specific commitments or there are other arrangements in place. Now, this fragmentation is clearly difficult from a market access perspective. But it is clear that Starlink is willing to commit to complying with diverse legal requirements. These practices are likely to set the industry standards. Though it seems very difficult in today’s global dynamics, aligning regulatory approaches through regional or treaty based initiatives could have reduced the regulatory burden on the emerging satellite broadband market and enhanced these measures’ effectiveness. But I do not see that happening soon in the next couple of years. Now, I will end my intervention by briefly talking about the data governance issue. Digital platforms, cloud services, data analysis. This is a PowerPoint. that shows the satellite infrastructures placed in the overall internet infrastructures. I thought it could be informative, so I’m sharing that as well. And in that context, I want to talk about digital governance. And our digital platforms, cloud services, data analysis and processing technology businesses have accumulated immense funds and influence, global influence, as a result of their global reach to data. The concentration of these companies in a few states, as well as resulting in global imbalance, benefiting from data resources, has raised concerns about the exploitation of countries that merely provide data and rely on others for digital technology, access and services. This concept is known as digital colonialism. And it is understood to expand the already existing digital divide. Now, the deployment of Leo satellite broadband services is also evaluated in terms of their position in the global data value chain. And there are questions if they have the potential to worsen the problems labeled as digital colonialism, as I just mentioned. Now, we argue in our research that if a common understanding of data governance in the context of satellite broadband is to emerge, transparency in data use and flow patterns of this technology will be essential. If satellite broadband technology is to contribute to sustainable development, authorities and users will expect their concerns to be addressed and debated openly. We argue that this would be best achieved through a multi-stakeholder process. And with this, I end my presentation. Please, we can discuss, I can take a few questions here, but also you can reach me through this email if you have further questions after this panel.

Roxana Radu: Thank you so much, Berna, very insightful presentation. I’m sure there are lots of questions. May I suggest that we keep all of that for the final discussion and we go now to our third speaker who has kindly agreed to join us from the US in the middle of the night. Huge commitment to the IGF there. Jane Coffin is no presentation. A lot of you will be familiar with everything she has done in the past 30 years or so. She’s a seasoned executive and internet community expert who has been working at the Center of Connectivity and Infrastructure Development Policy and Regulatory Strategy and International Development for many years now in different parts of the world. So we’re very excited to hear your remarks, Jane, before we go into a conversation with everybody online

Jane Roberts Coffin: and in the room. Thank you so much, Roxana, and thank you for everyone for this panel and it’s very exciting to be with you. I should say good afternoon, good morning, good evening, because I know people are beaming in from around the world. I just have to give a quick disclaimer that I’m speaking in my personal capacity. I’m not speaking on behalf of any entity and nothing I am going to say draws on non-public data. All the data is public or from my own experience. I’m going to come, what I’m going to say is more from the practical, is as practical as you were hearing from Dan and Berna, but from a different perspective and it adds another dimension to the technical, the policy regulatory, but also the more practical policy regulatory perspective that needs to take place on the ground, I believe, in a country when you’re assessing something like looking at licensing or bringing LEO connectivity into your country. There’s a huge dynamic here with respect to the need for a holistic collaborative approach across the multi-stakeholder ecosystem and that can be done, of course, through mechanisms like governments working across different ministries and different entities, as Dan and Joanna, I’m sorry, Berna were both mentioning. There are the technical aspects, so you need the technical expertise. There’s the legal, regulatory expertise that you would need. And if you don’t have it, you can draw on others who have been through the process. And you need that policy expertise, but also the practical, how do you do something on the ground in a country? How do you get it done? Where do you start? And I often like to say that when you start to have that practical focus, you really have to start to lay out a feasibility assessment and approach to how you would assess a LEO in your regulatory framework in your country. What would you do? Where do you start? And then what the impact is, and Verna’s mentioned the environmental, Dan has spoken about technical, there’s also the question of how are you going to integrate a new type of technology into your current infrastructure ecosystem? Where does it fit? Does it help with redundancy and resiliency? What are the economic implications? And it’s really, I think it’s useful to lay this out. And a way that you can find out more information about how that’s been done before is to read the paper, of course, that Verna and Joanna put together. But there are other guides out there. There’s one on satellites and communications by Dr. Whitney Lohmeyer, more from a technical perspective. That might be interesting. It breaks down satellites in general. It’s also taking a look at other countries’ filings and proceedings. If they put out a notice of public rulemaking or if they’ve done what’s called a notice of public inquiry where they’re just gathering data. And those are really useful tools from a practical policy and regulatory approach. Ministries use them all the time. UN agencies use them all the time. Regulators do. And I think what I would just say is that because we’ve heard that this is a grand experiment from Dan, that’s a great phrase. When you’re looking at this from a regulatory perspective, there are some very hard, hard, fast rules on the ITU-R side, which Verna mentioned earlier. But if you’re looking at this from the more holistic across government approach, you do need to be flexible. If you think this is only going to take one proceeding, I think that you could take a look at what other governments have done and realize that it’s as iterative as we move into the system of having more of these constellations, mega constellations, as Verna noted. earlier, in the ecosystem. And I would quickly just mentioned from that overall landscape approach when you’re looking at what to do. And those feasibility assessments. These have been run by other in other contexts, you know, for broadband mapping, for example. In other countries, there’s lots of data out there on how to run a feasibility assessment or to do a notice of public inquiry to gather that data. And it’s a normal tool I just want to stress again and pulling in that information is also extremely useful to you as an as whether you’re a regulator policymaker or civil society just trying to figure out what across the multi stakeholder multi stakeholder ecosystem is relevant to you. It’s also really important to think about your neighbors if you’re a landlocked developing country. I’ll take a country that I visited several times which is Kyrgyzstan. They’re triple landlocked. And so as a country and in the middle of many other countries. There are border issues. There are issues of, you know, can I talk to a can I work with my partners nearby. In order to see what’s good regionally and looking across the region from from an economic perspective and what’s doable. There’s also research, taking a look at again, not only the paper that the colleagues have written Burnett and Joanna, but others out there, there’s something called Leo con which is an interesting group of people that have come together. There’s the Internet Engineering Task Force looking at standards and other organizations looking at standards like the ITU. So you can broaden out your information you can take a look at all of the resources cited in different publications a paper in particular. And Dan also has when he didn’t mention a document he’d put together in the ITF which is also super helpful. Where you can also find good global information is working through the ITU development sector. There’s some questions looking at different types of connectivity on the ground and redundancy and resiliency and what that means for your country. From the technical community perspective, I mentioned the IETF. I’m sure there are others out there. You just want to do a survey. And that’s where that notice of inquiry can be really interesting or notice of information. I mentioned the ITU. There’s UNOSA, there’s JOSOA, there are other governments out there that have run these processes themselves. So take advantage of those processes to inform yourselves. There was a conference just recently there in Riyadh, I believe. It was the Connecting the World from the Skies Conference from the 25th to the 26th of November. So last month. There’s good data that’s coming out of that event, I believe, and lots of good experts there that participated globally. From a collaborative governmental approach, and Verna had mentioned this earlier, but I’ll just say this from my personal experience. You really need to know what the trade and customs authorities are thinking on customs duties, right? And I used to say this when I worked at the Internet Society that promoting the internet is wonderful, but keeping it in jail in a customs warehouse is another thing if your equipment isn’t certified. So take advantage of other countries having gone through processes, look at what they’ve done, run your own inquiry process because that will give you a lot of data. And it will help you think about those cross-governmental sort of vectors that you would want to create. It’s more of interconnection across government agencies versus networks. But that’s also a good thing, too, because you’re going to want to sync up and make sure that other parts of your system, your governmental governance system, are working well together. Also, I’m not going to touch on some of the data sovereignty issues because Verna hit on those, and that is not my expertise, but I would just take a moment also to say that from a funding perspective, these are expensive systems. So if you’re looking at working regionally or in your country, there’s some really good projects that have come to light recently. The ITU has something called the Digital Infrastructure Investment Initiative. I know a lot of the development financial institutions, which are the Islamic Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank. Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and others, and the IFC and the World Bank, they’re all looking at how do you start to fund more of more infrastructures, speaking of redundancy and resiliency, so not just one, but what does it take to look at funding large ecosystemic projects? And it’s worth noting that you have a role to play on the ground when it comes to those sort of feasibility assessments yourselves of what can the country bear if it’s a loan or a grant? What can you take in? And also perception of risk. Jonah had talked about digital colonialization. There’s also the importance of debunking or sort of taking apart the concept of risk when you’re looking at investment. And this is something I was looking at a different life, different job, but you’ve got to take a look at what that means from your own perspective when you’re talking to investors and you have to have a lot of data. That is yet another reason for looking at all the great research that’s out there, doing your own research and educating yourselves, but also looking at the proceedings of other governments so that you can see the different resources they’ve used in order to create a better, more informed process in your own country. I’m gonna stop there so that we can take other questions, but I wanted to just say, I’m coming at this from a practical approach, but it’s a cumulative practical approach. And if you look at how connectivity and from a policy and regulatory perspective, successful programs look at that technical, economic, the legal policy and the practical. And we can’t forecast what all of what’s going to happen, but you can get very well informed and draw upon other data that you can bring into your own policy and regulatory ecosystem. So thank you very much. Over back to you, Roxana, for questions from the audience. You bet.

Roxana Radu: Thank you, Jane, for zooming in on the know-how, but also the know-when and know-with-whom, because these are equally important questions. And as Berna also outlined before, And there are so many different patterns that can be explored in this, so many different country experiences, so many different paths that we might be able to engage with. And it has, on the one hand, regulatory, legal implications, technical implications. But you brought into the conversation, Jen, the question of risk. And there are obviously financial risks, there are investment risks, there are also assessments of risk that you can do on the ground. But something that has been on my mind through all the conversation is the question of cyber security. So what do you do with the risk of cyber attacks and going beyond just establishing that baseline of sustainable funding and sustainable connectivity? What happens when there are disruptions to that? And I think we might just have into the room now just the right person to talk about this very briefly. Joanna Kulesza has been able to join us. Her name was mentioned since the beginning. She’s a convener of this session, but also co-wrote a number of papers with Berna on the topic. She’s a tenured professor of law and teaches international law, internet governance and media law at the University of Lodz in Poland. Joanna, are you able to jump in? We’ll see if she can be unmuted. We might need some technical assistance. Roxana, we’re just… Now we have her. We have her. Yeah. I see that she was able to unmute. Okay. Anna is working on that.

Kulesza Joanna: I think we have a mic and the camera has not yet been enabled, but I’m glad to speak. I also see we have a few questions, a question coming from the audience, which is amazing. I’m more than happy to use the camera once it’s enabled. It’s wonderful to see everyone. Thank you so much for all the presentations, and I apologize again for not being able to join you from the very beginning. Thank you so much, Roxana, for your skilled leadership. I always get very excited when cyber security… mentioned also with Joanna. Yes, you can turn on your camera. There you go. I can see you. Great stuff. That’s how excited I am to see you guys. Thank you so much again. So just to intervene briefly I am mindful of the time. Thank you, Dan. Thank you very much for your onsite assistance. Cybersecurity, I believe, is the flip side of everything that Berna kindly skillfully presented. We’ve been looking at data. Data in Europe primarily means personal data and it means privacy. It means GDPR compliance that Berna was kind to discuss in detail. But the flip side of data governance is cybersecurity. So I feel like it might make sense to put it on the table before we enter the Q&A session. Roxanna rightfully highlights risk assessment. That seems to be a deconsensus among states. We focus on risk assessments. We build them into legislative frameworks like the NIS and NIS2 in Europe that includes satellite connectivity. But there’s so much more to be said about cybersecurity. It is the question of investment. What equipment do we invest in? The conversation Berna and I have been having around Leo started with 5G. Are there lessons from 5G with regards to supply chain security we could apply? It seems as if 5G caught at least Europe, but not only Europe, a little bit by surprise. We knew we had to have it, but we had little policy with regards to how we select the providers. It seems these lessons are now being repeated with Leo’s. We know we want them. It’s just a question of who is going to provide them. There is heavy funding, both in Europe. Just the latest headlines indicate the budget allocated to Iris Square. And Europe is pushing hard towards, this was just mentioned by Jane, digital sovereignty. We call it technological autonomy here. We would like to have our own Leos. In the report that was kindly mentioned, we would think about this as our Leos. So Leos that are funded and controlled and the data access is exclusive to those who manage them. contemporary providers on the market, they are bound by national laws on data access. This could be the national cybersecurity policy that obliges service providers to store data locally and enables governments to have a peak into those databases. So particularly when developing countries are thinking about using LIOS, these are definitely policy considerations to be included. And one theme that I believe is coming to the foreground of these discussions is also quantum computing. It seems as if China is investing heavily into the quantum to make sure that the provision of LIOS services is more efficient. This might be the cutting edge of innovation that will be added to the heavy investment in LIOS and the services that will follow. They are a part of the Belt One Road Initiative. So we just might see the discussion around LIOS sustainable development and data, including data access, have a very strong cybersecurity component. Again, mindful of the time, noting the questions already from the floor. Thank you again so much, Roxanna, for your skillful readership. Let me know if I can assist with the Q&A, but I’m more than happy to follow your lead here. And thank you everyone for contributing and for joining the session. Thank you.

Roxana Radu: Absolutely. I think we’ll move right into the questions part. So let’s go to the room and Dan might need to help us with passing around the microphone so we can hear online, but let’s start a conversation. Please feel free to also put your hands up online so we can see the questions coming in.

Dan York: Is there a question here? Okay, yeah.

Vladislav Ivanets: Yeah, hello everyone. My name is Vlad Ivanets. I’m this year Internet Society Youth Ambassador. So I think just yesterday, Europe has announced its IRIS program and they plan to invest like 10.5 billion. billion euros into launching their own satellites but there will be like 290 of them in comparison to 7 000 that Elon Musk has and China has like thousands of them and this program will it is like aimed at six following years so with this amount of satellites do they really able to compete with the private sector and with the agency they have like to create the regulations and like to prevent the private companies to be presented in Europe do you think that the sphere they can it can be regulated to that much that private company will be kind of limited from being presented in Europe for example yeah and what do you think can has more potential to win this space war I would say private companies or governments at the end

Dan York: anybody want to who wants to take that or should I say a few words or Joanna

Berna Akcali Gur: okay go ahead okay so I’ll just say a few words and maybe Joanna would like to add another point so the iris square project started as the motivation for the iris square project was to also have a secure space-based connectivity for the European governments but then when we saw the regulation proposed at the commission they also talked the regulation also talks about the the competitiveness in the commercial global commercial of the global market of the European Union companies. And so you mentioned, how do we choose, how does the European Union choose these companies that it will work with? There’s a strong security component as to how these companies are selected. So for example, one European company, one French company, it became a shareholder in OneWeb, which is a UK, India venture. And so the European Union was skeptical as to whether it should work with that company because it compromised, they thought there could be a compromise as to their security requirements. So when you look at the U.S., there’s a, I mean, I’m not an expert in U.S. law, but from what I’ve been reading, the U.S. also have very strong security measures as to space sector. So there are import restrictions, there are export restrictions, and there’s a lot of secrecy around the Starlink technology and there’s a lot of secrecy around any type of space technology. So if you, this is a competitive market, but the competitive market is very much divided between along the borders of the states. And so I think the implication of this would be the states that lack the technology, that lack the expertise, would be unfortunately left behind or they would remain on the user side of the LEO technology. But there may be different opinions on this, but this is what I have been observing throughout our research.

Kulesza Joanna: If I may, two cents. I would strongly agree, whereas I think there’s an analogy to be drawn between this sector of the market and the discussion we’ve had in Europe around platforms, where there was also the question of whether we can regulate companies. Europe takes this challenge through, we call it co-regulation. So we invite platforms to the table, we have codes of conduct, you could call it social responsibility of business, but it’s a little bit more than that. You could compare it to that scenario, but I think as Berna rightfully mentioned, the governments will likely want to have the upper hand on this, particularly because of the cybersecurity component or cybersecurity. security angle. In Europe, through regulation, it is NIS2, but it’s so much more. But if you look at China, which will likely have a very attractive offer, particularly for developing countries, the government is having the upper hand on all of these technologies. So as much as I like the European co-regulatory approach to making, building consensus around internet-related policies, I think the governments might want to have the final say here. And one component, which I have not heard yet mentioned, but I’m just going to bring back to the discussion, is multi-stakeholderism. It seems like we have had this platform, like the IGF, developed to make those decisions. Because of cybersecurity concerns, I don’t think there is a multi-stakeholder platform for the specific component of infrastructure that is being decided upon right now. So that is an interesting path to follow. I think it just complements your question. How should we make these decisions? Is the multi-stakeholder model appropriate? Is there a place for multi-stakeholders to chime into the debate around LIOS? Or will it indeed be handled exclusively by governments? And if not, even international law, but probably more national law, with Europe as the exception, with a strong EU framework. Thank you so much.

Dan York: I think there is also an interesting element with the IRIS-2, the announcement that was there, in that it will be interesting to see what the business model is and what they do, because the reality is their satellites, in the plan announced yesterday, are not going to launch until 2030, or the first parts of that. Now, there are a bunch of open questions, because the winning consortium included two companies, Eutelsat, which has the OneWeb constellation, and SES, which has its own constellation in the medium Earth orbit, and also has some geo-satellites and and is in the process of purchasing IntelSat that also has a number of geo-satellites. And so it’s a consortium of companies that already operate in there. So there’s a lot of unknowns as to what they’ll use. Can they use some of the OneWeb satellites to get some of this connectivity up quickly? I don’t know. I mean, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes because it will take them at least through 2030, so another five years. And in that time, you’re gonna have Starlink continue to launch thousands upon thousands of satellites. You should have Kuiper launching, Project Kuiper out of Amazon and more. So there’ll be a lot of competition in there. Now, on the other hand, as you mentioned, Joanna, and there, this is a lot to do with European security and European sovereignty of control of this. And so it may be that a lot of the business model is funding through the government entities and the other folks who are using it in some form. So we’ll have to see. I think there’s a lot of questions still to be known. I mean, I welcome more competitors in this space. I think part of what we’ve seen that’s made the internet so successful over the 30 years is that it’s a network of networks with a lot of competition and pieces in there. So I would welcome in the space-based space as well. We’ll have to see. I don’t have any other questions in the room. Oh, I have one more, but I also know you do have somebody online if you want.

Roxana Radu: Yeah, maybe we can go to the question in the room and ask for technical assistance to unmute the participant online. Like that, we get a continuity of questions and we address them together.

Dan York: Okay, let me, I’ll give this to you here.

Alan Veloso: Well, hello everyone. Okay, hello everyone. First of all, thank you very much for this panel. My name is Alan Veloso and I’m actually from the Brazilian Space Agency. So I’ve been following up these discussions. I’m a technical advisor there of international cooperation. I’ve been participating of some UN forums as well. And maybe my point of speech here it’s just a intervention to say that I’m as a researcher, I totally agree that we need a multistakeholder. holder platform to discuss all these questions, all these points. From a government perspective, however, we have just approved our new bill in Brazil that is addressing some concerns in space sustainability. And this is a point that, in the end, make in the middle of a dilemma. How can we assure the university of connection, of connectivity, and at the same time guarantee that we are not polluting our atmosphere, that we are following some guidelines that are addressing sustainability issues. And this is a concern that we have there in Brazil, and our policy that will be regulating this matter is still under development. But it’s nice to see that forums like this, the IGF, are maybe the main arena that we must have in pursuit to discuss all that. And that’s it. Thank you very much for this panel. And yes.

Roxana Radu: Thank you so much. I said we’re going to couple two questions. So we have one more that will come from the online space. And we have Advocate Nosifu Nandipa, who might be able to unmute now.

Dan York: Actually, Roxana, I was just informed that I guess we are not unmuting remote speakers. They are to type their questions in the chat, and then we can read them from there.

Roxana Radu: We will do that. Okay. Thank you very much. That was not clear from the beginning. We do have another question that came in the chat. And this time it’s from Chennai, India. Professor Gopal is asking the following. In the internet world, much of the action is not felt, remains invisible. Is there any methods to make one conscious? of potential risks, I guess at the intersection of privacy and cyber security from what we can’t really see and touch as such. Who would like to address any of the two questions?

Kulesza Joanna: I’m glad to start us off letting our panelists thank you so much. First, I think it was more of a comment from the Brazilian participant than a question, but I do strongly feel about the point you were making, sir, in terms of this being the time to have the discussions and having them in the multi-stakeholder format as the IGF, also having them at the ITU. But I think the point of this specific session, the idea that has guided us in this work is to raise awareness also among the individual users of the internet. Usually, particularly the younger generation does not really care where the internet comes from, they just kind of want it quick and efficient. This might be also the default thinking of some governments, so I strongly identify with your point highlighting the need to have these informed discussions now before the space is over-polluted or polluted as a result of the new space race that we are witnessing. With regards to the question from Gopal, I’m going to go back to the multi-stakeholder model again. I see some of our ICANN colleagues both in the room and in the chat. Maybe the answer to make this efficient is to go back to the one world, one internet motto that Dan mentioned and go back to the technical community to make sure that they handle all the data according to the same principles and standards. I don’t think I have a good answer legally other than saying, well, you know, Europe solved it with GDPR. We’ve invented this brilliant piece of legislation that’s now implemented worldwide and protects data, particularly of individual end users. But I know that that might be a statement that resonates very well in Europe and not so well outside of the EU. That would be my immediate response. I’m more than happy to hear what Gopal and Michael… panelists and our distinguished moderator have to ask. Thank you.

Roxana Radu: We just received a question from Advocate Nsifo Ndipa. Can I ask it now and then we collect other thoughts on all the different comments and questions we received. So this is a question that refers to Africa. What are the implications of this development for Africa? What will be the criteria for African service providers to participate in the platform? Is this not further disintegrating the internet and its infrastructure to the detriment of the deep rural that are still unconnected?

Jane Roberts Coffin: So I would just put out that there are quite a few African governments that have already taken a look and licensed certain Leo Constellation service, Nigeria being one of them, Rwanda, Kenya, and so on. And there’s data out there where you can find that information. But there’s a great opportunity with, as I had mentioned earlier, taking a feasibility assessment across countries and regions. You could even work through the African Union or the African Telecommunion, the Internet Society, the Association for Progressive Communications. They’re all taking a look at connectivity on the ground. And there are a lot of other multi-stakeholder organizations, as Joanna has mentioned, from the civil society and other side, they’re very interested in connectivity infrastructure in general. And so in particular for certain countries that have geographic challenges, there are quite a few. If you think of the DRC or you’re looking at a desert country like Namibia or Algeria, there’s lots of opportunity for looking at how to bring in more redundancy and resiliency in your infrastructure. So it would be a potential mix of different connectivities because you don’t want single points of failure. The other thing I would highlight is that many African countries, I’m on the board of a non-profit called the African Internet Exchange Association. Many countries have internet exchange points in Africa across the islands and across the entire continent. Those are very important parts of internet infrastructure that can connect up with, say, LEO systems or fiber. But I would just say there’s lots out there. There are a lot of people looking at this and the other governments that have licensed the LEO constellations that are currently active would have information. And I would strongly promote the notice of inquiry approach from a governmental or regional perspective to pull in more data. on any of the questions that have been asked, but in particular on the importance of infrastructure, regulatory policy, sort of confluence and multi-stakeholder.

Dan York: Yeah, I was just gonna say that to the question around Africa, I mean, right now, if you look at the map that’s deployments, Africa is still unconnected. And it’s the part that it’s not available. And that has a lot to do with that whole regulatory, the licensing of spectrum that I mentioned at the beginning. They have to go through all of that to get it licensed, the ground stations, the consumer equipment, the spectrum allocations, the uplink and downlink. So it’s a lot of work to get it licensed for each country. And so that is a lot of the work that they’re doing. And so I think if somebody wants to see what’s the opportunity for telecom operators in there, part of it is working with the country to the regulators to see what can be done to get the licensings accelerated. And then I do think this whole direct to dial is a whole new area. And I would expect to see that not only SpaceX, but also AST Space Mobile and some of the others will all be looking to partner with telecom companies to give them this added access. And so that creates a whole new layer of interesting policies and things that have to be thought through. But that would be one opportunity as that all comes online. Roxana, we did get a message here that we do need to wrap up in this session. So we do need to go to some-

Roxana Radu: Yeah, indeed. We see a few more questions coming in online, but I think this will be for a follow-up discussion. And I’ll hand over to Joanna just for the wrap up and conclusion.

Kulesza Joanna: Thank you. Thank you very much, Roxana. And thank you everyone. I believe that the last two interventions are a great wrap up to the session. I’m thankful to all the participants online in the room, particularly to our panelists and our moderator for gathering around this round table in a multi-stakeholder format, sharing their expertise. I feel like we have a lot of potential and capacity in the room. The last messages focused on Africa and the potential it brings to the table with regards to connectivity are the perfect takeaway message in terms of the capacity being there, being built. I’m certain I speak on behalf of all of us. The questions can be- directly addressed to any of the panellists. Do feel free to reach out. All the contact information is on the IGF website. We’re easily reachable online and offline. So thank you very much for being a part of this discussion. We’ve designed this session as a conversation. We would like for this to be carried on among different stakeholders. So please treat this as an invitation to a conversation to be carried on. As Jane indicated, having an assessment of regulatory capacity in a country, in a region, the potential of technologies with regards to data. I’m thrilled we have Roxana with us who’s an ANISA expert on cybersecurity. So all the aspects that were just merely flagged during the session are conversation starters. So my message would be to invite everyone to keep this conversation going in a multi-stakeholder format, but also on the ground locally with your governments, with your regulators and with civil society. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to the panellists and to our moderator. Enjoy the IGF and let’s keep in touch. It’s a wrap. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.

Dan York: Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Agreement Points

LEO satellites offer connectivity to remote areas

speakers

Dan York

Jane Roberts Coffin

arguments

LEO satellites provide connectivity to remote areas

LEO could provide connectivity options for Africa

summary

Both speakers highlight the potential of LEO satellites to provide internet access to remote and underserved areas, particularly in developing regions.

Regulatory challenges for LEO satellite providers

speakers

Dan York

Berna Akcali Gur

Jane Roberts Coffin

arguments

National regulators allocate LEO orbits and frequencies

Licensing requirements vary by country and business model

A holistic, collaborative approach across stakeholders is needed

summary

The speakers agree that LEO satellite providers face complex regulatory challenges, with requirements varying by country and necessitating a collaborative approach.

Data governance and cybersecurity concerns

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Kulesza Joanna

arguments

Data localization and privacy regulations impact LEO providers

Cybersecurity is a key concern for LEO networks

summary

Both speakers emphasize the importance of addressing data governance and cybersecurity issues in LEO satellite networks.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers acknowledge the scale of LEO satellite constellations and the competitive landscape between private and government-backed initiatives.

speakers

Dan York

Berna Akcali Gur

arguments

LEO constellations require thousands of satellites in orbit

Competition exists between private companies and government initiatives

Both speakers express concerns about the potential concentration of power and decision-making in LEO satellite technology, potentially excluding some stakeholders.

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Kulesza Joanna

arguments

LEO technology could worsen digital colonialism

The multi-stakeholder model may not apply fully to LEO decisions

Unexpected Consensus

Environmental concerns of LEO satellites

speakers

Dan York

Alan Veloso

arguments

Environmental concerns exist around space debris and satellite de-orbiting

Balancing universal connectivity with space sustainability is challenging

explanation

Despite coming from different backgrounds (technical and governmental), both speakers raise concerns about the environmental impact of LEO satellites, highlighting an unexpected area of consensus.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement include the potential of LEO satellites for remote connectivity, regulatory challenges, data governance and cybersecurity concerns, and environmental considerations.

Consensus level

There is a moderate level of consensus among the speakers on the key challenges and opportunities presented by LEO satellite technology. This consensus suggests a shared understanding of the complex issues surrounding LEO deployment, which could facilitate more coordinated approaches to addressing these challenges. However, there are still areas of divergence, particularly regarding the balance between government control and multi-stakeholder governance in LEO decision-making.

Different Viewpoints

Role of government vs private sector in LEO satellite development

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Vladislav Ivanets

arguments

Competition exists between private companies and government initiatives

Europe is investing in its own LEO constellation for autonomy

summary

Berna Akcali Gur highlighted the competition between private companies and government-backed initiatives, while Vladislav Ivanets emphasized Europe’s investment in its own LEO constellation for autonomy. This reflects different perspectives on the role of government versus private sector in LEO satellite development.

Approach to data governance and cybersecurity

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Kulesza Joanna

arguments

Data localization and privacy regulations impact LEO providers

Cybersecurity is a key concern for LEO networks

summary

While Berna Akcali Gur focused on data localization and privacy regulations, Kulesza Joanna emphasized cybersecurity as a key concern. This suggests different priorities in addressing data-related challenges in LEO networks.

Unexpected Differences

Environmental concerns vs connectivity benefits

speakers

Dan York

Alan Veloso

arguments

Environmental concerns exist around space debris and satellite de-orbiting

Balancing universal connectivity with space sustainability is challenging

explanation

While Dan York briefly mentioned environmental concerns as one of several issues, Alan Veloso unexpectedly highlighted this as a major dilemma, emphasizing the challenge of balancing connectivity benefits with space sustainability. This suggests a more prominent role for environmental considerations in LEO satellite discussions than initially apparent.

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the role of government vs private sector in LEO satellite development, approaches to data governance and cybersecurity, and the balance between connectivity benefits and environmental concerns.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is moderate. While there are clear differences in focus and priorities, there is also significant common ground, particularly regarding the potential benefits of LEO satellites for connectivity. These disagreements reflect the complex and multifaceted nature of LEO satellite technology and its implications, suggesting that a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder approach to policy and regulation will be necessary to address all concerns effectively.

Partial Agreements

Both speakers agree on the potential of LEO satellites to provide connectivity to underserved areas, but they differ in their focus. Dan York discusses the general potential for remote areas, while Jane Roberts Coffin specifically addresses the opportunities for Africa.

speakers

Dan York

Jane Roberts Coffin

arguments

LEO satellites provide connectivity to remote areas

LEO could provide connectivity options for Africa

All three speakers recognize the need for a comprehensive approach to LEO satellite regulation, but they differ in their views on how this should be implemented. Berna Akcali Gur highlights the variability of licensing requirements, Kulesza Joanna suggests limitations of the multi-stakeholder model, while Jane Roberts Coffin advocates for a holistic, collaborative approach.

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Kulesza Joanna

Jane Roberts Coffin

arguments

Licensing requirements vary by country and business model

The multi-stakeholder model may not apply fully to LEO decisions

A holistic, collaborative approach across stakeholders is needed

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers acknowledge the scale of LEO satellite constellations and the competitive landscape between private and government-backed initiatives.

speakers

Dan York

Berna Akcali Gur

arguments

LEO constellations require thousands of satellites in orbit

Competition exists between private companies and government initiatives

Both speakers express concerns about the potential concentration of power and decision-making in LEO satellite technology, potentially excluding some stakeholders.

speakers

Berna Akcali Gur

Kulesza Joanna

arguments

LEO technology could worsen digital colonialism

The multi-stakeholder model may not apply fully to LEO decisions

Key Takeaways

LEO satellite technology offers significant potential for expanding global connectivity, especially to remote areas

There are major regulatory and policy challenges around LEO satellites, including licensing, data governance, and cybersecurity

A multi-stakeholder, collaborative approach is needed to address the complex issues around LEO satellite deployment

Environmental concerns exist around space debris and the sustainability of large satellite constellations

There is global competition between private companies and government initiatives in developing LEO satellite networks

LEO technology could potentially exacerbate digital inequality and raise concerns about digital colonialism

Resolutions and Action Items

Continue discussions on LEO satellite issues in multi-stakeholder forums like the IGF

Countries should conduct feasibility assessments when considering LEO satellite adoption

More research and dialogue needed on balancing connectivity goals with space sustainability

Unresolved Issues

How to effectively regulate LEO satellite networks at a global level

Long-term environmental impacts of large satellite constellations

How to ensure equitable access to LEO technology for developing countries

Addressing cybersecurity risks associated with LEO networks

Balancing national security/sovereignty concerns with open internet principles for LEO

Business models and economic viability of different LEO initiatives

Suggested Compromises

Using a co-regulatory approach involving both governments and private sector for LEO governance

Combining LEO satellites with other connectivity solutions for redundancy and resilience

Balancing open access principles with national security requirements for LEO networks

It’s all a grand experiment.

speaker

Dan York

reason

This concisely captures the pioneering and uncertain nature of LEO satellite technology and its governance.

impact

It set the tone for the discussion, emphasizing the need for flexible and evolving approaches to regulation and policy.

We argue that if a common understanding of data governance in the context of satellite broadband is to emerge, transparency in data use and flow patterns of this technology will be essential.

speaker

Berna Akcali Gur

reason

This highlights a key challenge and requirement for effective governance of LEO satellite systems.

impact

It shifted the discussion towards the importance of transparency and multi-stakeholder involvement in shaping policies.

There’s a huge dynamic here with respect to the need for a holistic collaborative approach across the multi-stakeholder ecosystem

speaker

Jane Roberts Coffin

reason

This emphasizes the complexity of LEO satellite governance and the need for diverse perspectives.

impact

It broadened the conversation to consider practical policy and regulatory approaches involving multiple stakeholders.

The flip side of data governance is cybersecurity.

speaker

Joanna Kulesza

reason

This introduces an important dimension that had not been fully addressed.

impact

It expanded the discussion to include cybersecurity concerns and their implications for LEO satellite governance.

How can we assure the universality of connection, of connectivity, and at the same time guarantee that we are not polluting our atmosphere, that we are following some guidelines that are addressing sustainability issues.

speaker

Alan Veloso

reason

This raises a crucial dilemma between expanding connectivity and ensuring environmental sustainability.

impact

It introduced environmental concerns into the discussion, highlighting the need to balance multiple objectives in LEO satellite deployment.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by highlighting the experimental nature of LEO satellite technology, emphasizing the need for transparency and multi-stakeholder involvement, introducing cybersecurity and environmental concerns, and underscoring the complexity of balancing various objectives in governance. The conversation evolved from technical aspects to broader policy implications, regulatory challenges, and the need for collaborative approaches across different stakeholders and regions.

How can we balance the need for universal connectivity with space sustainability concerns?

speaker

Alan Veloso

explanation

This highlights the tension between expanding satellite internet coverage and potential environmental impacts in space.

Are there methods to make users more conscious of potential privacy and cybersecurity risks in satellite internet that are not immediately visible?

speaker

Professor Gopal

explanation

This addresses the challenge of raising awareness about hidden risks in new internet infrastructure.

What are the implications of satellite internet development for Africa?

speaker

Advocate Nsifo Ndipa

explanation

This explores how new satellite technologies might impact connectivity and development in Africa specifically.

What will be the criteria for African service providers to participate in satellite internet platforms?

speaker

Advocate Nsifo Ndipa

explanation

This addresses concerns about access and participation for African companies in the emerging satellite internet market.

Is satellite internet further disintegrating internet infrastructure to the detriment of deep rural areas that are still unconnected?

speaker

Advocate Nsifo Ndipa

explanation

This raises concerns about potential negative impacts of satellite internet on existing efforts to connect rural areas.

How can we create a multi-stakeholder platform to discuss satellite internet governance issues?

speaker

Joanna Kulesza

explanation

This suggests the need for a more inclusive approach to decision-making around satellite internet regulation and deployment.

What are the cybersecurity implications of satellite internet, particularly regarding data access and control?

speaker

Joanna Kulesza

explanation

This highlights the need to explore security concerns specific to satellite-based internet infrastructure.

How will quantum computing impact the efficiency and security of satellite internet services?

speaker

Joanna Kulesza

explanation

This points to the need to consider emerging technologies in the development of satellite internet systems.

Can private companies compete effectively with government-backed satellite internet initiatives?

speaker

Vladislav Ivanets

explanation

This raises questions about the future competitive landscape of the satellite internet market.