On 21 January 2025, our President and CEO Sally Wentworth spoke at the “ICT for Development” luncheon at the Pacific Telecommunications Council 25 event. These are her remarks as prepared.
Good afternoon! I am Sally Wentworth, President and CEO of the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation – and it is my great honor to speak with you today. Thank you to Elizabeth Fife for inviting me here and for the warm reception by so many of you.
As I introduce you to the Internet Society, I want to begin with an example of why we do the work we do. Let’s begin with the story of Fatima Baloch.
As Fatima entered the final years of her high school in rural Pakistan in June 2022, she didn’t have high hopes for her future. In her village, good jobs for women were scarce. Fatima wanted to work in an office, but without a higher education—which her family couldn’t afford—it was out of the question. But in her village, a new community network was installed that year with the support of the Internet Society Foundation– and a technology lab opened offering digital skills training for people of all ages and genders. Fatima started taking classes, volunteering at the center, and then exploring scholarships that would get her to a university program.
Fatima’s story is one of millions – and it is the reason for the work we do.
You may be asking “so who is the Internet Society?”
We were founded over 30 years ago in 1992 by some of the Internet’s early pioneers. People like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Jon Postel and many others were participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF, building the open standards that powered the early Internet. They didn’t want those standards to be controlled by governments or large tech corporations. They wanted to ensure that the standards could be used by – and created by – everyone. And so they created the Internet Society as a legal home for that work of the IETF.
Open standards are still part of our DNA. Protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP are how all of us communicate each and every day. It is so important that the IETF continue its vital work – and we provide substantial financial support each year to ensure that these open standards are made by everyone and are available to everyone.
But our founders’ vision was far broader than just standards. As Vint Cerf, our first President, said to me once, “we believed that out of the Internet a society would emerge.” And they wanted an organization that would work to ensure that above all “the Internet is for everyone.”
That vision, that the Internet is for everyone, has guided our work over these past 33 years and remains as important today as it was then. Helping to bring the Internet to everyone and ensuring that that everyone has a voice in shaping the Internet’s future.
In the last five years alone, we have:
- Helped create over 85 community networks, bringing Internet access to communities in some of the hardest to reach communities
- Facilitated creation of 64 Internet exchange points, interconnecting networks and helping create more affordable and reliable Internet
- Supported over 45 local technical communities to ensure that there is local expertise to support digital development
- Trained over 15,000 students in digital skills, providing a path for them to advance their own lives and improve their communities
- Defended the Internet with advocacy in 181 countries
And, since its founding in 2020, the Internet Society Foundation has granted nearly a thousand grants totaling over $63M across over 120 countries.
We don’t do this work alone as staff. We’ve built a global movement of over 133,000 individual members. We have 129 chapters and special interest groups of volunteers spread across the globe. Here in the Pacific region, we have a strong chapters across the Pacific Islands, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as chapters along the Pacific coasts of North and South America.
Working with partners and allies all around the world how we do our work.
You may ask where our funding comes from to do all this. Since the early 2000’s, a substantial amount comes from our subsidiary, the Public Interest Registry or “PIR”, that operates the .ORG domain and a set of related top-level domains in the public interest. Every time you register or renew a domain managed by PIR, a small portion of your fee flows to support our work.
We also receive financial support from people, companies, foundations, and organizations who support our work through donations, grants or by joining our community of over 80 organization members that include APNIC, the Internet Institute of Japan, Google, Meta, and InternetNZ. Partnering together allows us to achieve greater impact than any of us could do on our own and we would welcome any of you to join with us in this work.
So, that’s who we are. Now let’s talk about the challenge before us, as a community that is committed to bridging the digital divide by expanding access to the Internet and leveraging digital technologies to address of the most pressing challenges facing the world.
I spoke at the UN’s recent Internet Governance Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and while there heard the ITU’s Secretary General, Doreen Bodgan-Martin provide some sobering statistics:
- There are still 2.6 billion people in this world without Internet connectivity This is about 1/3 of the world’s population.
- 84 percent of people in high-income countries have 5G connectivity, while only 4 percent do in low-income countries
- The digital gender gap is actually widening in least developed countries
- Mobile Internet is 14 times more expensive in Africa than in Europe
- The average smartphone can cost up to 40 percent of average monthly income in some countries
And then she asked us all if we were satisfied. And of course, the answer is no.
We have come so far over the past 30 years – but there is still so far to go to ensure that the Internet is for everyone.
As we look ahead at the next five years, the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation have two strategic goals. Our first is that “people everywhere have access to affordable, reliable, and resilient Internet.” And our second is that “people everywhere have an Internet experience that is safe, secure, and protects them online.”
It is that first goal that is the focus of this luncheon today. How do we get affordable, reliable, and resilient Internet to everyone, everywhere?
I want to touch on the word – resilience. I don’t need to tell anyone here about climate change and extreme weather and the challenges these present for Internet infrastructure – you all are living that every day and I believe there is a lot we all can learn from what you are experiencing.
You also have great experience with subsea cables, a topic that has been in the news a great amount in recent weeks. Recent stats say that there are over 200 cable cuts each year across the world, each of which requires a period of time to repair.
So, in light of this, how do we build a more resilient Internet?
A key part is simply having more paths for connectivity. More subsea cables. More fiber networks. More satellite connectivity, particularly as new low Earth orbit systems are coming online.
But another component is to create more connections between existing networks and systems. Here, Internet Exchange Points or IXPs are the key. They interconnect networks so that when one path fails, existing networks can have other options for connectivity.
Let me give you an example from the Asia-Pacific region.
In the Maldives, they had a challenge. Accessing local content and data was very expensive – and slow. Even if you just wanted to view the website for the local government or for a business on one of the islands, if the site was connected to a different network operator from you, your traffic had to go across international connections and come back to the other provider. This was expensive and unreliable.
A strong local technical community started looking at how to change this. And in 2022, that community worked with the Internet Society, APIX, APNIC, the APNIC Foundation to formally establish the Maldives Internet Exchange or “MVIX”. More local network operators joined and MVIX immediately saw a massive flow of local traffic.
Today our data shows that 70% of locally popular content – like those government websites or local businesses – is being accessed locally in the Maldives.
This means that Internet connectivity is more affordable, more available, more reliable, and much more resilient for the users in the Maldives.
We have a site – pulse.internetsociety.org – where we measure the resilience of networks within countries and regions. If you go there, you can see the Internet Resilience Index for your country. It looks at infrastructure, performance, security, and market readiness and we make this analysis freely available to anyone who visits.
The data on Pulse shows a complex story across the Pacific region. Australia and New Zealand have a resilience index of 59% while the region of Micronesia has an index of 33%. By digging into the data, we can look at tailored approaches to address gaps in different countries and understand the investments that might be needed to improve resilience.
Pulse is a resource you all can use to understand what needs to be done in the markets you’re working in.
So, Internet Exchange Points are a key piece of infrastructure that contributes to an affordable and resilient Internet.
Once that infrastructure is in place, the next step is to extend connectivity out to hard-to-reach communities.
All too often we have seen well-intentioned plans to “connect the unconnected” that involve dropping in equipment to remote areas. “Run fiber to every village” or “give everyone a satellite dish.” And sometimes that works. But in so many cases there are stacks of broken or unused equipment lying around on islands across the Pacific.
We have seen a better way.
We have seen a model of community-centered connectivity that works.
In our model, equipment and technology are part of the equation, of course. But we have found that working with the local community is far more important to determine a sustainable business model that works for them. We have also found it is critical to provide training to help ensure that the local community has the technical skills necessary to build and maintain the networks over the long run.
We also help the local community ensure government policies and regulations support community networks, and we help them build a strong and sustainable local technical community to ensure the connectivity is sustainable and keeps growing.
We have seen this work right here in Hawaii with the Waimanalo community. We have seen this work in the Gaba gaba community network in Papua New Guinea. We have seen this work in the Khunde community on the slopes of Mount Everest in Nepal.
It is our belief that, with the right support and training, local communities can connect themselves to the Internet, maintain that connectivity, and, in the long run, defend that connectivity.
They know what to do when it breaks.
This is a key part of resilience.
It is not easy. It is not quick.
But it works.
And we are committing over $30 million dollars over the next five years to bring this model to more places across the world, including the Pacific Islands.
We can’t do this alone – we need your help, and that of so many others, to scale this work. As I said earlier, partnership and collaboration is part of our DNA.
Over 2.6 billion people still do not have access to the opportunities provided by the Internet. And WE do not have access to their creativity and their ideas. We live in a world with many challenges – inequality, access to healthcare, impacts of climate change and so forth. We need everyone engaged if we are to solve these challenges and move forward as a global society.
We need to enable more people like Fatima to find a hopeful path for her future.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today – and I look forward to working with all of you to ensure the Internet is for everyone.