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No Alternative to Internet Local Content-Kalu

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Ndukwe Kalu is president, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) and also the chief executive, Amsco Telecom

Kalu is an accomplished engineer with robust credentials. He has been on the forefront of improving Internet penetration and inking Nigeria positively on the Internet map. He told emeka okafor how in this interview

 

Making .ng Lucrative

That is a very good question because clearly there are contentious issues about how national registry should operate. The Nigeria Internet Registration Association (Nira) board has taken a decision to grow the Nira domain and make it something that registrars would be want to be part of and in fact make it the number one preferred domain in Africa and one of the few domains for the world and the steps taken are the following:

First of all, we have radically changed our few key policies. We have proposed a retail price of N5, 000 during the consultation period and after consultation the published price now comes to N1,000 through the registrar. You know with competition, it would be low but that means .ng will be the cheapest domain second only to .com in the world at the price the registrars buy it. In fact, it is cheaper than .com if you factor in the charges on top of the domain that people pay for.com or registrars pay. That is for pricing. Secondly, we are trying to put together what we call the pioneer registrars and we have given a lot of concession like lowered price, paid some fees so that we can have registrars and we are going to have 10 expressions of interest from registrars outside the country. Some of them are Nigerians in diaspora while others foreigners. There’s a foreign company in Senegal that is applying so we are looking at registrars from across the world pushing the domain so that the domain becomes a primary preference.

The third area is technical infrastructure which is very fundamental. We are looking at immediate automated domain registration. We are looking at immediate domain propagation which means if you registrar your domain now it will just take a few minutes you will see it. It will be propagated all over in the internet. It won’t be like take 48 hours. No, it will now be propagated instantly and then you can register a domain 12 midnight or whatever time and it is done in seconds. We are very confident that before the end of this month (August) we will be able to achieve that particular payment of automated registration and immediate propagation so what means is like a domain of preference. I can access it if I meet the criteria and then once it’s registered, I can easily pick up my site, there’s no delay of one week, ten days, etc.

These are the three things that we are trying to do with provision of .ng as a primary domain for Africa and basically the domain of preference globally.

Plans Embrace .ng

First of all, the first plan we have is that we have made it cheaper. You know Nigerians love things that are very cost effective. They want the best of good ones at low price and high value and that is what we have been able to achieve with .ng.

Secondly, we are working on a major awareness campaign that we already have indicative interest from corporate sponsors that are multifaceted .We are talking about website competition across many categories that create the consciousness of the type of website you should put out there, whether in the public or private sector. We are talking about a drive for content with intent on the people are ready to put their money on, a site they feel will be +able to generate revenue. We are talking about a drive for content with intent on the one people are ready to put their money on , a site they feel will be able to generate revenue .We are talking about a drive for local role play, trying to push hosting providers to provide facilities that are of international standard. All these are geared towards ensuring that Nigerians can embrace .ng fully because if you remove the impediments of. .ng and bring them at par with those of other countries, if there’s awareness and facility to host and register it, if the price is cheap, then the issue is why shouldn’t I. So that is what we want to do. Then, you know there are issues of course it is not critical now of setting IP from Nigeria. It is not just. ng even if it is .com and the IP resolved is a Nigerian IP, Nigerian IP club , there are issues about that and we are working on that .Hopefully we feel with time we should be able to resolve that to ensure that something from Nigeria is respected except when there are issues of fraud then the necessary organizations, both the service providers like ISPON and ATCON and the enforcement agencies like the Nigeria police and EFCC can step in and do something but then Nigerians should be given benefit of the doubt that they are legitimate customers and not the other way round.

Shutting Out Fraudsters on .ng

Our conditions for registrars are stringent. There are two issues that tackle that. First are the conditions for registrars, second are the conditions for registrants. Now the registrars, we have an accreditation process to ensure that they are credible people and we also have a bond that they must deliver, because once you become a newly accredited registrar, the registrants will begin to meet you and give you money and say I want to register and if the registrar is not a credible person, he may pack up and go. So, that is why we insisted that all registrars must produce a bond. So, in the case of failure we can call on the bond to use it to compensate the registrants. So, we feel with the accreditation process and the bond , we should be able to ensure that we have minimal default from registrars. Now the other aspect is for registrants.

New registrant is listed for domain and we have said these are the criteria for getting a domain so if you don’t meet those criteria you cannot have a domain. Now if you have the domain and that is why we have also emphasized that every registrant will sign an agreement electronically and say I accept this agreement and if you are registering a domain you are to be enlightened both in competition and global best practice informing you that the registry which is like Nira from Nigeria has the ultimate right over that domain .It can be withdrawn from you because you manage it on behalf of Nigeria.

Also the listed things like pornography, fraud and generally other things that are against the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria are against charters Nigeria has signed to which you cannot use the domain for .

Structure in Place

You know it is not easy for a new organization by any stretch. When we came in, it was like coming in from all the issues, all the misunderstanding that happened. We were coming into a situation whereby there was really nothing on ground. We had no technical infrastructure, no physical infrastructure, basically nothing. So, we had to take a decision and priorities and our first priority went to technical because we felt if we have a wonderful office and people can’t register their domain still, it comes to nothing. So, we put everything into the technical infrastructure that you should be seeing this month . And the next thing we are tackling is the structure itself, the physical structure, the office and the manpower as it should be. We already have some reports about the structure of the operational base of Nira and it is our hope that when we finalize on that, get to the next stage of equipment, get to the next stage of acquiring an administrative office stage , we should have been able to tidy that and have it fully in place . Right now we have a temporary secretariat based here. Give or take, we are expecting that to take 3 months because we are going to choose the right set of people, get the right place and put it in order. We are feeling that by September/October, we should have tidied all that in place. But we are also working towards moving to the permanent site even with temporary structures in place. Our key priority is to ensure that we have a technical infrastructure that will pride the .ng goal in place.

Web Juries

Well, the intention of the board was to take over the web juries and expand it to various sectors and be a barometer for the value of content on the Nigerian .ng domain which is critical.

One or two companies have shown an enormous appreciation in value content. Some people have mentioned it to us that they look at some government sites, they look at some private sector sites and they are amazed that people could put out those candid things.

But unfortunately in our negotiations and discussions with Philip Consulting, we could not really find a common ground where Nira, a fully independent body could get managed and expanded working with them. So, the board decided to withdraw from that and rather set up a broad web assessment platform that will involve all sectors , not just banking, the industrial sector, the public sector itself .So, we are going to come up with web assessment platform that will truly become effective from 2009, but we are going to publish the details this year so that people will know the barometers, the inspections and so on and so forth and be able to integrate .So web juries will remain as it is but we appreciate what they had in mind and what they wanted to do by initiating a programme such as the web juries.

Increasing Local Content

Well, like I have said it over and over and people have said, well is that not over-emphasizing the issue and the issue of local content can never be over-emphasized. First of all, broadband plays a critical role in a nation’s development. It played a critical role for India, America. There is a report done in America 10 years about the impact of broadband and why some states were ahead of the others and so on. It clearly showed benefits from different areas from broadband. Then by having local content, let’s say most of your traffic end locally then it means that 80-90% of our cost for internet access will be cut simply because of going local. In china, over 95% of their traffic is local and the same in the U.S whereas n in the U.K it is over 90%. So the cost for them for internet access is the cost to get to that content which is within their country and the price of bandwidth within the country is less than 1% of the price of bandwidth to any other country which is likely to be the U.S which is called the backbone of the backbone. So with that you achieve a cost effective internet access. If you want broadband it will be affordable and there is no alternative to having local content. And when you are talking about local content, we are not just saying you build any site you see. No, you are talking about things people want. If you measure the traffic, a lot of it is on email, chat. you are going to build the same world-class email and chat that Yahoo and Google are known for . Anything short of that, Nigerians won’t patronize it and you are back to square one. So, it is a lot of effort but every country has done it by seeing the need for it and promoting it. They promote it through the internet exchange point and initiative that put people in them.

 

 

 


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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