 We're here at the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2014 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and I've got the great pleasure of being with Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda who's with the U.S. State Department. Ambassador, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you, it's good to see you again. I'd like to talk to you about ICTs. How important do you think ICTs are in stimulating economic growth and social progress? They're incredibly important. In the first instance, they're important in and of themselves. So they create jobs by putting down fiber and laying down the infrastructure necessary to get people connected. But then once people are connected, it makes people more productive in every sector of the economy. And as a matter of social development, it increases the access that kids have to education and to information worldwide. And it allows for the end of, for example, gender discrimination and the provision of financial services. So there are any number of different ways in which the ICT sector and the deployment of services seeps throughout the entire culture, seeps throughout the entire society to promote development. What, in your opinion, is ITU's role in extending benefits of ICTs into the developing world? There are a number of different roles that the ITU can play, particularly through its development sector. One is in sharing best practices. So you look at comparable markets that are comparable in terms of capacity that are doing differently, that have better or worse rates of access and acceptance of the service where people are using it and why. And then you try to make sure that public policies that work well in similar markets are deployed in similar markets. And that's a big part of what's necessary. But other points are incredibly important, such as ensuring that you know who the right people are to go to after a natural or a man-made disaster occurs. You can get the communication system back up and running quickly while removing regulation and red tape to ensure that the equipment can get in and the people can get back online. Because you see that people are able to find family members that would have been lost otherwise using communications technology once it's back up. Small businesses are able to get back up and get incoming equipment and things that they need to sell. It's just an enabler of getting the country running again. And that's incredibly important. And that's a unique role that the ITU can play in ensuring that everyone has those procedures in place to do so. What are some of the U.S. government and U.S. private sector policies that are helping to close the digital divide? Well, we have a number. So the U.S. AID has a program called the Global Broadband Initiative. And what that program does is it goes into countries around the world and helps them set up universal service funds so that you have urban, dense areas capable of subsidizing the deployment of the network in rural and sometimes poor areas. That's incredibly important to ensure that you get national service. That's one example. Another example is and most recently is you see Google with their Loon project, which is trying to put up balloons at a sub-orbitable level, I guess, to make sure that there's broadband connections in poor areas of Africa. The other Facebook is talking about doing internet.org and using drones to do the same thing. There's a self-interest within the internet community to have more people on the network. Every additional person added to the network adds value to the network in and of itself. So that kind of self-reinforcing cycle, which is what we try to encourage our private sector actors to do while at the same time using public policy and public services to create an enabling environment for that activity. And finally, we're here at the World Telecommunication Development Conference. It's a conference that happens every four years. What do you hope will be some of the outcomes from this conference? Well, I hope that we can obviously drive development in the developing world and that we can help them lead the way toward that. We're here to share best practices to make ourselves available, to make our private sector available, to make our financial markets available, to ensure that people do get connected. And at the end of the day, what we need to walk out of here with is the idea that we have shared values and shared desires as a world to connect every child in every community in the world to the most revolutionary communications network that has ever existed. Ambassador Sepulveda, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you, sir. And thank you for being with us too.