Session
Organizer 1: Matthew Schwartz, Innovators Network Foundation
Speaker 1: Michael Mudd, Private Sector, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Kulesza Joanna, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
Speaker 3: Brian Scarpelli, Private Sector, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Matthew Schwartz, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Matthew Schwartz, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Matthew Schwartz, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Round Table - U-shape - 60 Min
1. Does a competition vs. fragmentation tradeoff exist within currently circulating digital platform proposals, given their proliferation across different markets and legal regimes? Is fragmentation avoidable while respecting the sovereignty of nations and regions to create their own regulatory paradigms?
2. How is the trend toward digital platform regulation influenced by regional economic imperatives?
3. How is the average internet user helped or harmed by jurisdictions taking individualized approaches to digital platform regulation?
Connection with previous Messages:
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Targets: Stricter platform competition rules could broaden access, increase consumer choice, and incentivize platforms to compete on innovative privacy practices and services. At the same time, if proposals are not appropriately tailored, they could inadvertently create privacy or security risks for end-users and/or undermine the ecosystem for innovation. Finding the appropriate balance is crucial to continued progress toward numerous SDGs.
Description:
Over the past year, legislators and regulators in jurisdictions including the U.S., U.K., EU, India, China and elsewhere, have leapt into action with proposals intended to increase competition in markets led, and sometimes dominated, by large tech platforms. While the motivation and particulars of such proposals vary widely, key components tend to be prohibitions on self-preferencing behaviors and requirements to effectuate greater data interoperability access for the third-party companies who both rely on the large platforms to reach customers in the greater market, and who, in many cases, directly compete with those same platforms. Such rules could broaden access, increase consumer choice, and incentivize platforms to compete on innovative privacy practices and services.
Yet as jurisdictions begin to finalize and implement such proposals, the tension between competition imperatives and maintaining regulatory interoperability with other jurisdiction grows. This dynamic especially impacts smaller players, for whom navigating bespoke regulatory regimes is more of challenge than it is to larger companies, which could ironically decrease competition via regulatory arbitrage. Similarly, questions are beginning to arise regarding the inter-regional competition implications of such proposals, including whether they can constitute de jure or de facto discrimination against companies headquartered abroad.
Even nations themselves find themselves juggling competing preferences within various arms of government. For example, France ultimately withdrew a competition challenge to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature due to its privacy-protective effects that benefit its citizens and the United States recently sent a letter to the European Commission raising serious cybersecurity concerns with its Digital Market Act (DMA) proposal, even as the legislature considers its own digital platform regulations that could have similar effects.
This panel will assess the extent to which recent competition proposals around the world can contribute to internet fragmentation; assess current proposal globally; and provide insight into how to harness the opportunities and mitigate challenges in this moment of great impetus on tech regulation.
i. Understand the spectrum of opportunities and challenges that existing competition proposals bring to bear on the open, free and interoperable Internet?.
ii. Learn about what the IGF community can do to further action and cross-sector collaboration to realize the potential and work through challenges surfaced in the conversation.
iii. Share diverse perspectives regarding the discrete priorities and/or changes needed from the IGF community to combat these challenges and harness opportunities.
Hybrid Format: i. For each of the areas of interest, introductory short presentations/remarks by experts will provide basic knowledge and discuss important trade-offs. The moderator will ensure the active participation of the audience, who will be able to intervene and ask questions to the experts. Sufficient time will be given to online participants to ask questions, by the online participator. Following these initial interventions, the roundtable will get to the heart of the debate, guided by the moderator who will begin by giving an opportunity to online and in-person participants to pose questions and discuss views on the strategies presented. In addition to the background documents and papers that will be prepared ahead of the IGF, additional articles of interest, reference materials and social media conversations will be published and distributed ahead of the workshop. The moderator and organizing team will work with speakers in advance as to ensure the quality and the content of the discussion.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.