IGF 2017 WS #167 Internet Governance in times of the Digital Economy

Short Title
Internet Governance & Digital Economy

Proposer's Name: Mr. Carlos Ruiz

Proposer's Organization: Communications Regulatory Commission (CRC)

Co-Proposer's Name: Ms. Claudia Bustamante

Co-Proposer's Organization: Communications Regulatory Commission (CRC)

Co-Organizers:

Ms., GALPAYA, Helani, Civil Society, LIRNEasia

Additional Speakers

Juan Manuel Wilches

Organization: Communications Regulatory Commission (CRC)

Stakeholder Group: Government

Regional Group: Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)

Biography: Juan Manuel Wilches has a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and an MBA from the Schulich School of Business, York University, in Toronto, Canada, where he graduated with honors in 2009.

His work experience began in Colombia in 2000 as Advisor for the Telecommunications Regulation Commission – CRT where, for a period of almost 7 years, he led and advised several projects on telecom regulation, carrying out activities in the definition of interconnection conditions, termination rates and conflict resolution, as well as performing market analysis, and developing models for fixed and mobile network costing.

During his stay in Canada, he worked at Kazam Group as a consultant in telecommunications, where he specialized in wireless communications.

In 2010 he was contacted to be part of the team that created the National Spectrum Agency (ANE) in Colombia, joining the Agency as Senior Advisor to the Director General. He was subsequently promoted as a Deputy Director for Spectrum Management and Planning, position in which, together with his team, he developed the National Spectrum Management Policy adopted in 2012 and a comprehensive spectrum management and planning framework currently in place in Colombia.

His recognized experience in regulation and spectrum management led him to be appointed by the Minister of Information and Communications Technologies as Commissioner in 2013 and Executive Director in 2014-2015 for the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC), being reelected as Commissioner in 2016.

Specialty: Competition, personal data, ICTs for development, Infrastructure for providing digital services, Digital Economy.

Email: [email protected]

Format

Session Format: Round Table - 60 Min

Agenda

The session has the following 60 Min format:

1. Welcome and Session Objectives: Moderator (5 min).
2. General views of the matter and sharing of experiences, including each speaker approach to hint questions (7 min for each panelist).
3. Open Q & A, including online questions (15 min).
4. Summing up, final remarks from speakers and Conclusions: Moderator (10 min).

Content of the Session:
This session is intended to provide a broad vision of the landscape involving the digital economy, the importance to innovate and to learn the main challenges we are facing in this regard.

A group of experts will debate the future of Economies in the digital age, and other attendants may share their views on the matter. Also, speakers will share their views on how the race between technology and regulation/policy is likely to play out in the near future.

Relevance of the Session:

The Internet is an ecosystem where infrastructure, users, and services must be backed by good public policies. Such policies must take into account all multiple stakeholders (civil society, governments, entrepreneurs, and the technical community), a key aspect of Internet Governance. Hence the importance of having an Internet governance that promotes and leverages the development of the Internet and the digital economy.

Without a strong Internet Governance, there is no favorable framework for the economy to continue growing and it risk losing its benefits in terms of economic growth and job creation. The relationship between Internet Governance and Digital Economy is such, that the OECD Declaration of Cancún (signed by the Colombian government in June 2016), emphasized the need to support "(...) the free circulation of information, with the intention of fostering innovation and creativity, through policies based on respect for human rights and the rule of law that reinforce the openness of the Internet, in particular its distributed and interconnected nature, while respecting the privacy and data protection and strengthening digital security".

The Declaration also mentions that "(...) the management of digital security risk and the protection of privacy at the highest decision-making level" will contribute to "(...) maintaining the essentially open nature of the Internet, while at the same time, achieving certain public policy objectives, such as the protection of privacy, security, intellectual property and minors on the Internet, as well as strengthening trust in the Internet"

Trust is a key issue in order to foster the digital economy. The panel will also analyze the importance of digital security and privacy by design.

The outcome of the panel is to clarify the relation between Internet Governance and the Digital Economy and to learn what specific topics of IG must not be forgotten in the digital economy.

Tag 1: Digital Future
Tag 2: Digital Economy
Tag 3: Internet-based Innovation

Interventions:

Colombian Commissioner Mr. Juan Manuel Wilches, as the moderator, will start providing some general ideas about the way Internet Governance and Digital Economy work together in order to promote development; this intervention would seek to briefly point out the main drivers of the interaction between Internet Governance and Digital Economy. After that, Ms. Helani Galpaya (CEO of LIRNEasia), Ms. Verena Weber (Policy Analyst from OECD), Mr. Pablo Hinojosa (Strategic Engagement Director from APNIC) and Mr. Virat Bhatia (Chair of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industries FICCI) will have 5 minutes each for giving their views on the matter, and will invite attendants to share their opinions, also answering their questions. Remaining time should be used for interaction within the round table. According to each stakeholder viewpoint, each speaker will elaborate on the way Internet Governance empowers development and consolidation of the Digital Economy, with specific forms of digital labor, remarked success cases, policy barriers, investment promotion, etc.

The following questions will be proposed as drivers of each speaker’s intervention in order to stimulate the debate:

  • From your stakeholder-group point of view, what does Digital Economy represent? Do you indeed identify any relation of this topic with internet governance? If so, what would be the most relevant issues between digital economy and Internet governance for your stakeholder group? Is there any opportunity or threat that people should be aware of regarding this matter?
  • Do you think the embracement of the multistakeholder approach facilitate a better development of a digital economy? Even more, do you identify an experience from a specific industry or geographical area where this approach has contributed to development and thus, empowered a digital society? What else could be considered by other stakeholder groups (especially government) to encourage it?
  • What is the role of trust in the digital economy? How the Internet Governance model may support or inhibit that role? Could you provide some insight about the implication of Internet Governance in developing such role?

Diversity:

1. Diversity of speakers: we have invited experts from civil society (LIRNEasia) , private sector (FICCI), intergovernmental organization (OECD),  technical community (APNIC) and government (Colombia´s Communications Regulatory Commission).

2. Diversity of regions: Our participants brings together representatives from Asia Pacific (APNIC, LIRNEasia, FICCI India), Europe (OECD) and Latin America regions. Please see Background paper, which include an ilustration of this geographic representation.

3. Genre participation: Two panelists and the rapporteur are women. Two other panelists and the moderator are men.

Onsite Moderator: Juan Manuel Wilches Durán, CRC
Online Moderator: Alejandro Delgado, CRC
Rapporteur: Lorrayne Porciuncula, OECD

Online Participation:
We will have an online moderator, who will remind the remote participation during the roundtable. From social networks with the hashtag #IGFDigitalEconomy , we will invite community to participate in the workshop transmitted by the IGF WebEX. Also, moderator will follow online questions, looking for answers from both speakers and other attendants.

Discussion facilitation:

Moderator will provide hints about the main subject, i.e., how Internet Governance and Digital Economy work together in order to promote development. After that, each speaker will have 7 minutes for giving their views on the matter. Then the moderator will invite attendants to share their opinions or questions and the panelists will answer these questions. Remaining time should be used for interaction within the round table and closing remarks.

Since the main goal is to enrich interaction of the audience, speakers and moderator will add elements to the discussion from each stakeholder viewpoint.

Conducted a Workshop in IGF before?: Yes
Link to Report: https://www.intgovforum.org/cms/wks2015/index.php/proposal/view_public/79

Additional Reference Document Link: http://learn.icann.org/p/digital-trade-and-global-internet-governance

Background Paper

Session Report (* deadline 26 October) - click on the ? symbol for instructions

Session Title: Internet Governance in times of the Digital Economy WS#167 - Date: December 20th, 2017 - Time: 17:20-18:20 - Session Organizer: Communications Regulatory Commission (CRC), LIRNEasia - Chair/Moderator: Commissioner Juan Manuel Wilches, CRC - Rapporteur/Notetaker: OECD, CRC - List of Speakers and their institutional affiliations: Helani Galpaya, LIRNEasia (https://www.intgovforum.org/user/1477) Pablo Hinojosa, APNIC (https://www.intgovforum.org/user/1512) Verena Weber, OECD (https://www.intgovforum.org/user/2081) - Key Issues raised (1 sentence per issue): • This session focused on providing a broad vision of the landscape involving the Digital Economy, the importance of innovation and a special focus on becoming aware of the main challenges in the Digital Economy. The main goal of the session was to discuss the linkages between digital transformation policies, and how the implementation of those policies can affect Internet Governance. Also, speakers shared their views on how the race between technology and regulation/policy is likely to play out soon. • Developing countries are trying to define how to take advantage of the digitalization processes in their countries because they are not used to: they don't have specific processes on innovation or adoption of technology. • Each country is trying to decide on how to better adjust to digitalization or how to better take advantage of the Internet as a tool for social and economic development. • Description of session: https://igf2017.sched.com/event/CTrl/internet-governance-in-times-of-th… • Session transcript: https://www.intgovforum.org/content/igf-2017-day-3-room-ix-internet-gov… - If there were presentations during the session, please provide a 1-paragraph summary for each presentation: As an introduction to the topic of the adoption of policies for digital transformation and their link with internet governance, Juan Manuel Wilches started the session by explaining the current situation in Colombia. During the last 7 years, Colombia has had a very rapid development of Internet adoption through infrastructure deployment and appropriation by citizens. Last month, the CRC, the communications regulates, published a "Regulatory Roadmap for the Development of the Digital Economy in Colombia", which contains a strategy to promote digital transformation in the country. - Please describe the Discussions that took place during the workshop session (3 paragraphs): The creative use of public data could be made by governments to provide solutions to health, transportation and other social related citizen issues. Among the challenges involved in this initiative, there are aspects that should still need to be reviewed like data sharing, jurisdiction aspects of hosting data outside the country, rules applying to those data that you have from your citizens. To promote digital transformation, countries need to embrace a holistic approach in their own economies and economic sectors. Sometimes the introduction of new ways of producing goods and services may impact jobs and well established regulatory schemas. At the other hand, a demand of new skills for the digital economy surges and new competition is created. The multistakeholder governance model has been used for 25 years in the decision making process of the allocation policies regarding IP addresses among Internet service providers in the Asia Pacific Region. It is a bottom-up process, participatory private sector led and community based. This participatory model may demand more time than any other decision making model process but probably better decisions in the end in terms of policies. Therefore, there is value of considering the views from the technical community and from other stakeholder groups into the decision making process before governments take decisions that ultimately will have an impact or will affect the operations of the network at many different levels at the higher level of the digital economy or applications or the digitalization policies. - Please describe any Participant suggestions regarding the way forward/ potential next steps /key takeaways (3 paragraphs): • The cross boarder data transfer is a policy making issue governments have to review in order to facilitate the emergence of digital economies. • Considering the views from the technical community and from other stakeholder groups into the decision making process before governments take decisions that ultimately will have an impact or will affect the operations of the network. Gender Reporting - Estimate the overall number of the participants present at the session: 25 persons. - Estimate the overall number of women present at the session: 7 women. - To what extent did the session discuss gender equality and/or women’s empowerment? None. Please note that this issue was out of the workshop scope. Though, it should be taken into account that the multistakeholder approach is relevant for considering the views from all stakeholder groups -regardless gender inclusion- into the decision making process. - If the session addressed issues related to gender equality and/or women’s empowerment, please provide a brief summary of the discussion: NA