 Welcome to the ITU studio here at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today, Mr. Dietmar Plessy who is the senior executive officer for the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy for Germany. Dietmar, welcome to the studio. Thank you very much for receiving me here. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. Now, I wanted to ask you, you've been very much involved in all of the meetings here and all the plenaries and proceedings. I just wanted to find out what do you see as the top challenges facing the Union in the next few years? Well, I mean, there are many. Of course, the first thing is that the Union is considered as being the top ICT organization in the United Nations system. And this is, of course, a place to be defended. And I think there are a lot of things pending at present at the plenary with regard to internet-related questions and the role of the ITU therein. You know that, of course, in Europe we have the opinion that the role should be limited, but of course we are not of the opinion that there should be no role. So to find the right equilibrium, the balance is a challenge on the political level. And then, of course, you do have challenges which we will probably address later in terms of administration and management. And there were some decisions taken here in my Committee 6 to undertake studies, for example, on regional presence. It's one example on ITU telecom. And this will be, of course, these studies may challenge the present way it's done. And then it's always difficult, I know, to convince member states to change. You were chair here of Committee 6. I just wanted to find out. How was that experience? For me it was a great experience, a great honour. First to be selected by my regional group, Europe. Second, of course, at my ministry, despite the fact that we are a small delegation at least for our country, allow me to do it. They suffered a lot because I was not available for the delegation at all. I fully concentrated on chairing Committee 6. It was, I guess, relatively successful. We had one issue coming to the plenary here, and it was solved this morning. So I'm totally satisfied. Excellent. That's very good news. Now, this plenary potentially conference has seen calls to modernise ITU. You talked about that a little bit before. Where do you think that ITU could make the biggest strides? I mentioned already that there is a problem as present with ITU telecom, which is of course not the main activity of ITU, but it was a very attractive one many, many years ago. There are attempts to come to this level again. It will be very difficult, even if it will be impossible, but of course the situation should improve. We have revised the relevant resolution 11 in my committee. Among others, there will be an independent advice from outside to try to find the right place for ITU telecom in the ICT environment in order to become more successful, attract more exhibitors and attract more participants for the forum. The ITU Member States, of course, of which you are involved with one, have just resolved to strengthen ITU's regional presence. What does that mean and what benefits should one expect to see? This is a difficult area and it's a second area where I see a room for improvement. The relevant resolution 25 that we revised in committee 6 now calls for staff to be in this regional office with knowledge of all the three sectors of the union. I'm personally convinced a single person is not able to have this and this is a big concern. There are now many years ago Germany and others made a proposal to strengthen the regional presence in order to centralize more staff at the regional offices to have a larger team. But of course this would then... Well, in order not to have a lot more costs for the ITU that means you have to close the area office or some of the area office. This was challenged by the countries in the respective regions. They didn't want to close the area office. But I see this as the only possibility to have sufficient knowledge in the regional presence if you concentrate a greater number of staff with all the expertise that is available in the ITU in the regional office. What is going to happen afterwards of course they have to travel a little bit more in the region but I think it's worth to think about. But again, we have decided that there should be a review of the regional presence and of course we will have to wait about the results of this review. I already talked with the director PDT-Elect on this issue and she reacted, I think, positively with regard to this idea also knowing that it's very difficult to realize. You've been at a number of ITU events obviously in the last few years. I just really wanted to find out from you how does this compare? Has this been relatively smooth? Well, we are not at the end. So the plenary now ongoing may end up in a similar situation that we had at the WTTC 17 last year in Buenos Aires which was not the most pleasant experience we had in ITU conferences in the past. But the chairman is very able trying to push people to consensus and as I mentioned at the beginning of my community it's a high value the principle of consensus in the ITU but of course if you want to maintain this principle then there is another issue that is compromise otherwise you will not find consensus. So I think the chairman of the conference is exactly on this path and I'm optimistic that the conference as such will be a success at the end. Let's hope so. Thank you for joining us in the studio for sharing some insights behind the scenes at this plenary conference and we hope to catch up with you again in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you.