 |
|
|
SEPTEMBER
25-27 Sep, Sydney
Submarine Networks World 2017
25-27 Sep, Singapore
25-28 Sep, Busan
25-29 Sep, Busan
25-29 Sep, Hong Kong
27-28 Sep, Busan
OCTOBER
2-3 Oct, Kuala Lumpur
3-4 Oct, Singapore
9-20 Oct, Buenos Aires
24-26 Oct, Dhaka
24-26 Oct, Trivandrum
ISOC Asia Internet Symposium
25 Oct, Vietnam
25-27 Oct, Jakarta
26 Oct, Kuala Lumpur
Indonesia Internet Governance Forum
28 Oct, Jakarta
ISOC Digital Accessibility Workshop
28 Oct, Jakarta
28 Oct - 3 Nov, Abu Dhabi
30 Oct - 3 Nov, Shanghai
NOVEMBER
8 Nov, Auckland
9-10 Nov, Auckland
11-17 Nov, Singapore
12-15 Nov, New Delhi
15-17 Nov, Bangkok
16-19 Nov, Lahore
ISOC Online Privacy Conference
17 Nov, Singapore
bdNOG 7 Conference
18-22 Nov, Bangladesh
20-22 Nov, Bangkok
23-24 Nov, New Delhi
ISOC Asia Internet Symposium
27 Nov, Yangon
28-30 Nov, Yangon
28 Nov - 1 Dec
DECEMBER
4-8 Dec, Singapore
4-8 Dec, Nuku'alofa
10-15 Dec, Bangkok
18-21 Dec, Geneva
2018
24-26 Jan 2018, Hiroshima
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
SEPTEMBER 2017
|
|
|
|
This is a monthly e-newsletter published by the Internet Society's Asia-Pacific Regional Bureau. It has updates on the Bureau's activities and features insights on the transforming Internet landscape in and around the Asia-Pacific region.
If you like our e-newsletter, you can share it by clicking on the social media links above.
|
Editorial: 25 Years of the Internet in Asia and the Pacific (1992-2017)
|
|
|
This year marks the
25th anniversary of the Internet Society, and it's a good opportunity to
reflect on how the Internet has transformed and impacted our lives and the lives of others. It's also an opportunity to think about where we are right now and how we want to shape the Internet of the
future.
Most countries in the Asia-Pacific region had their first commercial Internet connection before the turn of the century, after which the use of the Internet began to grow rapidly. This growth was helped along with the launch of applications and services such as Wikipedia in 2001, Friendster in 2002, MySpace and Skype in 2003, Facebook and Orkut in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.
A key milestone was the launch of the iPhone 10 years ago in 2007, which helped popularise the touchscreen interface and further evolve the mobile apps ecosystem. The touchscreen interface also helped to dramatically lower the learning curve for first-time Internet users. Later, the availability of lower-cost smartphones and tablets paved the way for what is now a mobile-first region. The Asia-Pacific region reached one billion Internet users in 2012, and today, we are
close to two billion users, most of whom access the Internet through mobile networks and devices.
Recently, innovations and new business models have emerged from the region, notably the messaging apps - Kakao Talk (Republic of Korea), LINE (Japan) and WeChat (China) - that have now become platforms for a wide array of online services, including payments, money transfer, e-commerce and transportation (air, rail and taxi). Startups that have enjoyed huge success include Grab and Lazada, both launched in 2012. Grab began in Malaysia as a ride-hailing mobile app, and now serves some 30 cities across six countries in South-East Asia. The app's functionality has expanded beyond just taxi services, to include car-pooling, ride-sharing, private vehicle hire and various logistics services. Lazada also operates in six South-East Asian countries, combining Amazon's direct-retail model with the marketplace model, making it the largest e-commerce site in the region.
Economies in South-East Asia, as well as the developed economies in the region, including Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of Korea and Singapore are global Internet leaders that other countries are watching and learning from as they transition to a digital economy and society. And of course, China and India-two of the world's largest Internet markets-are influencing the Internet landscape, and playing key roles in the use of the Internet to address development challenges.
In the last decade, the number of Internet users in China grew five folds reaching
731 million in 2016. China now accounts for
over 60% of online buyers in the Asia-Pacific. Yet, there is still room for growth with Internet penetration only at 53%. On the technology front, China, together with Japan and Republic of Korea, are driving the development of 5G mobile technologies, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. It is estimated that there will be 8.6 billion "things" connected in the Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) by 2020,
1 out of 5 of which will be in China.
In India, growth has been even more dramatic with the number of Internet users increasing ten folds in the last decade reaching
432 million in 2016,
80% of whom access the Internet through mobile devices. However, with Internet penetration at only 31%, there has been a massive push through the government's Digital India initiative to connect the unconnected, and one of the areas of focus is the creation of local content. Last year, the Indian government announced that all mobile phones (smartphone and feature phone) sold in the country from July 2017 must be able to display content in the
22 official Indian languages and provide input capability in at least three languages-English, Hindi and one regional language.
The dynamism of the region can be partially attributed to the 750 million young people in the region who are driving Internet content consumption as well as production. Moreover, the Asia-Pacific region is home to a number of Internet pioneers and innovators that are inductees to the
Internet Hall of Fame and winners of the
Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. These Internet luminaries are from all parts of the region, including Australia, China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Despite the successes and opportunities for growth, it is important to bear in mind that more than half of Asia-Pacific's population is not yet online. Furthermore, people's trust in the Internet is being eroded following large-scale data breaches, uncertainties about how personal data is being used, cybercrime incidences, online surveillance, online violence and abuse, and the rise of fake news.
In addition to addressing these threats and concerns, increasing Internet affordability and locally relevant content, as well as tackling the underlying inequalities around gender and access to education and finance will be important in ensuring that the last two billion people not yet online are able to reap the benefits of the Internet. It is perhaps these last two billion people who have the most to gain from the Internet and the socioeconomic opportunities it can provide.
These complex issues can only be resolved through multi-stakeholder collaboration, and cooperation and coordination between the many actors and players that make up the wider Internet ecosystem. The Internet Society has just launched its fourth annual Global Internet Report 2017 that explores the
paths to our digital future, and includes a set of recommendations derived from input from our community. Join us - #thenext25, #shapetomorrow.
Regional Bureau Director for Asia-Pacific
|
|
Guest Article: Internet History -
The Asian Perspective
|
|
|
by Kilnam Chon, Professor Emeritus, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Several of us including
Kanchana Kanchanasut,
Jun Murai,
Tan Tin Wee and myself met during the first Internet Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the Internet Society's Global INET Conference in Geneva in 2012, and we came up with the idea to write the history of the Internet.
We formed the
Asia Internet History Project, and the project team has been documenting the Asian perspective of the Internet's history since 2012. Within a few years we produced three books -
Book 1 on the Internet in the 1980s,
Book 2 on the 1990s, and
Book 3 on the 2000s, developed by over 100 co-authors and around 60 advisers from all continents.
We started from the beginning of computer network developments in the 1970s, roughly ten years behind of USA. These developments largely took place in Australia, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
We had the first Asian TCP/IP network in 1982, followed by the first Internet-related conference in 1985. The major deployment of the Internet started in the late 1980s and early 1990s with international links between Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, and USA through the PACCOM Project. Countries in Asia also started to collaborate regionally in the Asia-Pacific through various events and networks such as Asia Net in the early 1980s, and the Pacific Computer Communication Symposium where many Internet pioneers in the Asia-Pacific, as well as in Europe and USA got together in 1985.
In the 1990s, the Asia-Pacific developed many regional Internet organisations starting from the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), followed by APNIC, APTLD, APAN, APRICOT and AP*, among others. The second book on the 1990s covers various aspects of the Internet including network operators groups, education and research networks, names and numbers, and internationalisation and localisation. The third book on the 2000s covers commercial Internet services, Internet governance, cybersecurity, civil societies, online education and social media.
We originally considered covering the Asia-Pacific region only, but we ended up covering other continents as well as global collaboration since there were no books or articles covering these topics extensively.
We invited many Internet pioneers to write personal essays, including a poem in Chinese and its English translation. We provided snapshots of the Internet in different countries at the beginning of the 1990s and 2000s. These snapshots include a timeline from the 1940s to 2010s, which would help Internet historian in many countries write their national Internet histories in the coming years and decades.
We
interviewed many Internet pioneers in Asia and elsewhere. We also collected and
archived over 500 articles and interview videos on our
website.
If you are interested in contributing an article, as we are missing many national articles, please contact me, chonkn at gmail.com. And we would be happy to assist you in writing the Internet history of your country.
|
|
|
Poem written by Hu Qiheng
|
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Internet Society.
|
Spotlight: Japan Internet Outage - What Caused It and How to Avoid Such Incidents
|
|
|
by Aftab Siddiqui, Technical Engagement Manager for Asia-Pacific, Internet Society
On 25 August 2017, the world witnessed another massive BGP routing leak, though BGP leaks are very common (you can check the number of leaks from
BGPStream - a BGPmon service). But large-scale leaks create massive problems. It was Google this time leaking more than 160,000 prefixes to Verizon, who unfortunately accepted these announcements and passed them on to its customers.
It is interesting to note that the leak took place in Chicago, Illinois but Japan felt its biggest impact as the major service providers including NTT-OCN, KDDI and IIJ were severely hit. The outage in Japan was so massive that the government announced, they are
looking into the cause, and the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry directed telecommunications companies to submit reports on the incident.
A
blog post on BGP Monitoring website BGPmon, gives a complete picture of what actually happened and another interesting
blog post from Dyn (Oracle) shares some insight of the issue. We are not going to discuss the technical details but just to give an idea as explained in the above blog post, Google leaked all the prefixes it was receiving from its peers, NTT-OCN and many other operators were advertising more specifics (de-aggregates) to Google and aggregates to the global routing table for the sake of traffic engineering. The problem occurred when Google started advertising all those specifics to Verizon, who did not filter anything (apparently) and redistributed to their customers.
Yes, it was Google's fault but Verizon was at fault equally - they should have filtered the routes coming in from Google. This is what the Internet Society's initiative MANRS has been suggesting to all service providers to implement. It is easy to make configurations mistakes and sometimes it is due to the bugs in software, and hence unavoidable at times. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to have BGP prefix filters in place. If you would like to learn more about
MANRS and understand how to avoid such incidents, please check the
MANRS resources or talk to us.
|
Chapter News: Chapters Around the Asia-Pacific Joined InterCommunity 2017
|
|
|
InterCommunity is the Internet Society's annual member meeting. Launched in 2015, our hybrid format brings our community together online and in-person for robust conversations about the issues and topics most relevant to us.
InterCommunity 2017 kicked-off with a live presentation of the 2017
Internet Hall of Fame induction ceremony. In its fourth year, the Internet Hall of Fame celebrates the extraordinary people who helped to make the Internet what it is today. Following the ceremony, the InterCommunity programme was passed to
Interactive Regional Nodes around the world for a lively discussion on the critical factors that will shape the future Internet. The conversations focused on key findings from our
2017 Global Internet Report.
Our Chapters and community around the Asia-Pacific joined this special occasion, and celebrated the Internet Society's 25th anniversary. Our Chapters either hosted or got involved at the Interactive Regional Nodes in
Brisbane,
Delhi,
Singapore and
Tokyo. The Chapters also arranged special celebration nodes in Dhaka, Islamabad, Jakarta, Kabul, Kathmandu, Manila and Trivandrum.
|
Profile Feature: Subhashish Panigrahi, Chapter Development Manager, Internet Society Asia-Pacific Bureau
|
|
|
 It's a shame that over half of the world's population is not yet connected to the web. Openness in education, governance, infrastructure development and leadership has and will continue to play a vital role in bringing the benefits of the Internet to everyone. The Internet Society has been a pioneer in advocating for an open Internet, and over the last 25 years, has brought together almost 80,000 members that are leaders of openness, and hundreds of partners across the world, to drive this movement for a free and open Internet, for the benefit of all people.
Having spent almost a decade connecting people and building online communities for Wikimedia and Mozilla projects, the work of the Internet Society has always been an inspiration to me, and I feel honoured to have the opportunity to work closely with the
Internet Society Chapters. I am looking forward to sharing knowledge and collaborating with many policy and tech leaders throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Prior to joining the Internet Society, I led Mozilla's community development in Asia and many of its Campus Clubs' research and strategy. I also catalysed the growth of communities and outreach/education programmes at the Centre for Internet Society and Wikimedia Foundation. I am conversant in five different languages and am located in Bengaluru, India.
Connect with me on
Twitter and
LinkedIn.
|
The Broadband Divide is Widening
The world is coming closer to having half of the population online, but there remains a wide and growing gap between developed and emerging markets, according to the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development's new
report.
|
|
|
|
Myanmar's Internet exploded with hate speech and fake news photos after the Myanmar military clashed with Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army last month.
|
|
|
|
|
The new telecom policy, expected by March 2018, will focus on providing affordable Internet access and facilitate domestic manufacturing to curb dependence on imports.
|
|
|
|
Chinese regulatory authorities have intensified their pressure on the local blockchain space. But in spite of the news, the market has experienced a quick uptick and significant recovery.
|
|
|
|
|
Not yet signed up to receive our emails? Join Now
|
|
|
