 Welcome to the Global Symposium for Regulators 2023, which is being held this year in Shamal Sheikh in Egypt, where I've got the great pleasure of being joined in the studio here today by Mr Bokar Bar, who is the CEO of the Samina Council, and has also just been chairing an IAGDECRO meeting, which has gone extremely well. Pleasure to see you in the studio today. Good morning. Thank you very much for welcoming me. So perhaps let's talk a little bit about the meeting that you just shared. Let's talk about IAGDECRO, what IAGDECRO stands for, and what were some of the key takeaways for you? IAGDECRO is an industry advisory group for development issue, chief regulatory officer meeting. This is a platform that has been established, if you remember, back in 2017, subsequent to a WTDC resolution, Resolution 71, that member states have decided through the ITU to foster developed strengths in the private sector, and the idea is private sector at large to present to the member states their views, impediment, what are the problems that the private sector is facing, so government regulators, policymakers can support them in their endeavour for the digital development. So basically, this is a voice, a collective voice, to be heard by the member state. And we had an excellent discussion this morning. The room was packed. We also had a welcome number of observer member state regulators. And the discussion covered a wide spectrum of issues, from the spectrum, from the taxation, deployment of fibre, satellite, sustainability. We covered almost all subjects this morning, a very interesting debate. And hopefully, I will be able to present a great outcome at the plenary session during this GSI. I'm not giving anything away at the moment about the outcome, but in terms of the discussions, they were pretty lively there. I mean, how did you manage to keep everything together, do you think? Well, my role as a chair of the IDE is to listen to everyone and to see how we can, as I mentioned, come up together as one voice to our government, our regulators. It was live because of the spectrum debate. Now remember, in the room, we have the MNOs. We have the satellite and space service providers. Of course, we have some disagreement in the industry. But at the end of the day, the idea is to put some recommendation forward to the government for their consideration. Therefore, the AGDPRO is not the platform for giving a deep dive about issues such as this spectrum. There are other fora and WRC23 will be hosted in Dubai, and that is meant for that. But once again, the beauty of the AGDPRO platform is to present to our regulators what we have identified as an industry together, as one voice that will impede the digital development. The key objective is to stand side by side with our government to see how we can extend our support, how we can work together, how we can collaborate and bring the other industries into this pace for digital development. And let's talk about the global symposium for regulators, which we'll be officially commencing tomorrow. What do you hope will be some of the outcomes there? Would you think that there will be any key challenges that they will have to overcome over the discussions over the few days that we've got here? Well, number one, it's good that we have seen in the agenda of the GSR globally, we will be addressing regulation about new technologies. As you know, artificial intelligence is extremely important, and that is going to be at the heart of the discussion that we are having going forward. Of course, spectrum, because WRC is going to happen tomorrow, but how do we foresee the future? How can we and regulators work together for a better future, centering the consumer, the customer at the heart of the digital development? We will be talking probably about ethics in many things. We will be talking about new application development. We will be talking about the metaverse. These are all new challenges, new technology that we have not been discussing before that will be discussed during this GSR. More importantly, what we want to see is also best practices. In many regions, it's very important that those who have succeeded in terms of digital development, and I'm talking about the regulators, if they can share their knowledge, their best practices with other regulators who might be inspired by the vision of those who have succeeded. Indeed. And I've had many regulators say exactly the same thing that they are here very much to learn from others, and also to impart their knowledge of course as well and their experiences, which I think is very important. You talked today about universal connectivity, but also meaningful connectivity. What exactly does that mean? We want to connect the unconnected and we want to leave no one behind. Of course over the past year we've been debating about the infrastructure for the connectivity, but we have realized, as I have mentioned this morning in the meeting, that we almost have 90% coverage across the globe. We need to look at the soft factor to ensure that the consumer is going to be connected and he wants to be connected. Therefore, there are what we call the soft factor, I'm talking about the affordability access to connectivity, affordability, literacy, but also coming up with some application development that will be needed by the consumer. We need the consumer to go to the technology. We are not planning to impose any technology on anyone, so it has to make sense. And this is where the local application development, the content localization is important for the population across the different geographies. So yes, we have discussed about meaningful connectivity. How can we globally stimulate the demand with the support of the government? I noticed you said today, let's not refer to some members in the room here as OTT. You said, let's refer to them as internet companies. You said otherwise they would refer to us as TTO. This is not a joke, but let's say a way to say OTT over the top. And this is an industry that has to live with us. We need to work together. They are needed for their expertise. And in some discussion in the industry, if we label them as OTT, they could label us as TTO, which means through the operator. So that was the joke we had this morning. Exactly. Which was a fair point, absolutely. Well, Bocca, thank you very much indeed for joining us here in the studio. It's been a pleasure catching up with you and obviously we'll be together for the next few days. But we will definitely catch up with you again very soon, I hope. Thank you very much for receiving me and it was always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much indeed. And don't forget that we are also going to be using these interviews as podcasts as well. We're going to be transferring these across to Sound. So do check out our SoundCloud channel and wherever you get your podcasts from. And we'll be doing plenty more interviews over the next few days. So do tune in again. Thank you very much indeed.