Tags: Internet, Telecommunications
By Alexander Villafania
MAKATI CITY, METRO MANILA – Filipino information technology executive Judith Duavit-Vazquez is now sitting in the board of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
She will be the first female Asian to sit on the board as well as the first Filipino to hold such a distinction. Yet despite a Filipino’s presence in the Internet’s most powerful organization, Vazquez still has reservations regarding Internet in the Philippines.
Noting that Internet use in the Philippines remains small, she described the country’s Internet is still “in need of a lot of work” and that there is a growing chasm of usage where that should force the Philippines to catch up with more developed countries.
She stressed that the Philippines lacks what she called an “open skies” policy for telecommunications wherein only one telecommunications firm handles all Internet traffic delivered by eight submarine cables.
These cables are used to bring Internet to the Philippines. However, Vazquez argued that the lack of “peering” between telecommunications firms keeps the cost of Internet access high, as well as quality of service low.
Peering is described as interconnection between telecommunications network within a country that are separate from the overall Internet administration. This lessens the cost of Internet access as data traffic does not need to go out of the country.
“We should also bring foreign investments to the Philippines because this will strengthen infrastructure developments in the telecommunications business. These investments would improve quality of service and thus increase economic growth,” Vazquez said.
She also posed a simple yet profound challenge to young Filipinos using the Internet: “How can you share to national progress using the Internet?”
Vazquez was officially announced in early August as one of the two new board executives in the 16-member ICANN Board of Directors. She is joined by fellow board member Stephen Crocker, the creator of the Request for Comment (RFC) series.
She will sit in the ICANN Board from her official introduction during the ICANN Annual General Meeting in October this year until October 2014, a three-year term that Vazquez stressed will be used to ensure that the Internet will remain relevant.
“The Internet only serves 30 percent of the world and the remaining 69 percent of the 6 billion people globally have yet to experience the Internet. We’ll tackle this concern with a number of changes that will be done for the next three years,” Vazquez said.
She enumerated four directions that the ICANN will be focusing on: the transition from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to IPv6; expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and domain name system (DNS); and the usage of more international domain name (IDN) that uses non-Roman text (technically called ASCII).
“What I want to make sure is that the Internet should be decentralized. It shouldn’t be the ‘Internet of the West’ but the ‘Internet of the World’,” Vazquez said.
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