The First Arab IGF Meeting

The First Arab IGF Meeting was held in Kuwait City between 9^th and 11^th of OCT 2012.

The Theme was for this meeting “A Better Internet for A better Arab World”.

The five accesses for this meeting was

            1-      Access & content

            2-      Internet Openness.

            3-      Critical Internet Resources.

            4-      Security and Privacy.

            5-      Youth.

The Agenda for the first Arab IGF was as following:

• Opening Ceremony and Main Plenary and Keynotes
• Session1:  “Access to Content, Or Content to Access”
• Workshops:

            1-      IXP in Arab World

            2-      IG Multi-stakeholders model in Arab world: Opportunities & Challenges.

            3-      Practicing Online Freedom of Expression in the Arab world & challenges of content filtering.

  Session 2:  “Internet Openness, Freedom of Expression and Content”

• Session3:  “CIR: Critical Internet Resources”
•   Workshops:

               1-      The Impact of Social Media on the Democracy.

               2-      Domain Names Industry in the Arab world

               3-      Towards a New Sustainable Internet Economy.

• Workshops:

               1-      Extending Regulations to Cyberspace

               2-      Moving to IPv6

               3-      Social Media for Entrepreneurs.

• Session 4: Security and Privacy
• Session 5: Youth
• Workshops:

                  1-      Protecting Children Online: Assessing blocking and self-regulation in the Arab world.

                  2-      Key Issues in implementing e-Accessibility for people with disability

                  3-      Youth driving our future technologies and businesses.

• Workshops:

                  1-      Policy requirements for women empowerments over the internet.

                  2-      Empowering youth using social networking to participate in the community development.

• Session 6: Talking stock and the way forward.
• Closing Session

Points raised from the participants:

• The International Indicators are the main evaluation Indicators to evaluate any IGF (e.g. No. of IP Addresses, Domains, impact on the GDP, etc.)
• The IGF should be Bottom up Multi-stakeholders.
• The National IGF’s has the privilege to set the national policies and Guidelines
• The North Africa IG forum is established, it is the Fifth Regional IG Forum in Africa.
• Tunisia also established their National IGF
• Mobile Data traffic will increase by 60% 2016.
• There is only 100,000 Arabic article in Wikipedia
• Saudization of the Saudi content on YouTube Increases the Usage of YouTube by 200% in Saudi Arabia
• Saudi Arabia is the First in the world to Access YouTube from Mobil Phones and second from Desktop.
• there is no accurate data to evaluate Internet penetration in the region
• The Arabic content increases 2500% in the last 10 years but still 2.2% from Internet content
• No polices in the Arab world for the content only we have polices for the infrastructure
• Arabic content are now 4GB/Month and it will increases to 14GB/per month in 2016