IGF 2020 Pre-Event #40 Interoperability: Openness in the Age of Platforms

Moderators:

• Vittorio Bertola, Head of Policy & Innovation at Open-Xchange
• Astor Nummelin Carlberg, Policy Director, OpenForum Europe

Opening remarks by:

• Smriti Parsheera, lawyer and policy researcher with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, India
• Dr. Ian Brown, Independent Researcher
• (Wayne) Wei Wang, PhD Candidate at University of Hong Kong & Administrative and Research Officer at Creative Commons Hong Kong
• Prof. Luca Belli, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School, Brazil
• Prof. Rob Nicholls, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales Business School, Australia

The event will bring a group of experts from across the world to spawn a broad discussion on how increased interoperability could be a way to solve some of the most intractable issues of the internet platform market. While direct content regulation has drawbacks in terms of fundamental rights and competition cases are both arduous and uncertain, policy aimed at enabling, promoting or requiring interoperability for certain market-dominant platforms through Open Standards arguably holds the most potential to open up the platform market to competition. It does this by lowering the barriers of entry to challengers with different business models. By extension, this would empower consumers and users across the world by offering them real choice in the platforms market.

Thus policy efforts promoting interoperability could have far-ranging legal, economic and human consequences. As we appreciate this, we plan to host an interactive round table allowing for several stakeholders to contribute. This matters especially because there are several interoperability policy efforts being proposed across the world, experiences of which should be shared. We plan to have initial presentations by experts to set the problem and the different solution models, followed by open discussion among all participants, breaking down the time into smaller slices on specific subsets of the issues and stakeholder perspectives.