Session
Organizer 1: Giulia Guadagnoli, OpenForum Europe
Organizer 2: Astor Nummelin Carlberg, OpenForum Europe
Speaker 1: Vittorio Bertola, Private Sector, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Alison Gillwald, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 3: Luca Belli, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 4: Huyue Zhang, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 5: Fiona Scott Morton, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Ian Brown, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Astor Nummelin Carlberg, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
Panel - Auditorium - 90 Min
We suggest focusing on three thematic blocks of policy questions:
1. Overarching concepts
2. State of play in the policy domain in the following geographical areas:
a. United States
b. European Union
c. China
d. Africa
e. Brazil
3. Potential course of action
To be specific, we have also included a series of potential sub-questions. Many of these are also critical in nature, in order to stimulate a fruitful discussion. While it will not be feasible to cover all questions, we hope this indicates the issues that we see as relevant. The exact content will be developed by the panellists and moderator, and potentially other organisations if the MAG proposes a workshop-merge.
1. Overarching concepts
(Dr. Ian Brown)
The moderator will provide a quick overview of the current policy environment worldwide, and highlight how increased interoperability could help enhance market contestability, attain an inclusive Internet governance, protect fundamental rights online, unleash innovation and achieve digital autonomy.
Questions:
- What is interoperability and how relevant is it to stakeholders such as users, consumers and SMEs on the Internet?
- Is it actually difficult to implement?
2. State of play in the policy domain in the following geographical areas:
a. Both sides of the Atlantic: United States and the European Union
(Dr. Fiona Scott Morton and Vittorio Bertola)
We aim to foster an organic discussion to tackle this policy issue from a multi-stakeholder perspective, by addressing policy developments, legal and technical complexities as well as market dynamics.
Questions:
- What is the current situation in the EU policy arena? Is the Digital Services Act Package, including both the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, enough to ensure fair, open and contestable digital markets?
- How has interoperability become so relevant in the negotiations revolving around the Digital Markets Act?
- What is the relevance of platform interoperability for businesses, particularly SMEs? Could you perhaps paint a picture of what the current challenges to compete in the internet market are?
- In June 2021, the House Judiciary Committee approved six bipartisan bills that target Big Tech companies. To what extent is interoperability playing a role in these bills? What are the next steps in the US Congress? If the Congress had to approve the bills, what are the implications worldwide?
b. Governmental regulatory push in China
(Dr. Angela Zhang)
Till now, the two Chinese companies Tencent and Alibaba have closed off Chinese digital markets, bricking up all interoperability between their platforms.
Questions:
- Why did the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) decide to act, and what did it do to tackle this issue?
- From an open-market perspective, what is the current state of play in China?
- Is there any course of action planned?
c. The digital landscape in Africa
(Dr. Alison Gillwald)
In the African landscape, there seems to be a strong interest revolving around interoperability as regards digital financial services.
Questions:
- What does the current digital policy domain look like in Africa, from an openness angle? Is interoperability part of such policy discussions?
- Are digital financial services actually at the core of these conversations? If so, why?
- Do you see the policy debate extending interoperability to other services provided in the digital markets?
d. Interoperability in Brazil
(Dr. Luca Belli)
In 2018, Brazil issued its Digital Transformation Strategy (E-Digital) for the period 2018-21. The strategy aimed to coordinate different governmental initiatives on digital issues. In this, interoperability found its place with regards to e-Health to bridge the gap between public and private health systems.
Questions:
- How has the implementation of E-Digital gone?
- From a regulatory perspective, is the focus for interoperability still on healthcare, or is it gradually extending to other sectors?
- Has the Brazilian government set any course of action regarding interoperability?
3. From monopoly to competition - Next steps
(All)
Questions:
- When regulating digital markets to make them contestable through interoperability, what are the main challenges that policymakers have to face?
- Looking at the future of interoperability, where is digital policy in your country heading?
- Is there a worldwide trend we can all identify? Have you witnessed a growth in political will to strive for interoperability as a pro-competition tool?
Connection with previous Messages: The panel we are proposing would strongly refer to the key IGF 2021 Message related to “Emerging Regulation: Market Structure, Content Data and Consumer Rights and Protection”. As the regulatory efforts we want to address are pushed forward and enforced by regional or national antitrust regulators and are based on the interplay between big platforms, competition, and consumer rights in a clear pro-competition framework, we believe that this discussion is fully in line with what IGF 2021 aimed to achieve.
Overall, we advocate for including interoperability provisions in platform regulation as it is one of the main tools to open up new digital markets to competition, innovation, consumer choice and digital autonomy.
Namely, interoperability is a key factor to enable fair competition, which in turn would restore the current unbalanced relationship between smaller digital players and the large dominant digital companies. Furthermore, interoperability can stimulate innovation by allowing new operators to enter new markets, thus creating an incentive for all operators to innovate and provide new features. Moreover, it provides users with real freedom of choice, by enabling them to communicate across digital silos thus choosing the digital services they want to be in based on their actual preferences. Finally, making digital services interoperable would result in more efficiency for public administrations, by providing them with a real choice of innovative platforms and services that better suit their own needs and their citizens’ needs.
4. Quality Education
5. Gender Equality
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Targets: Interoperability is a means to an end. By providing users and consumers with freedom of choice and increased access to more innovative and inclusive digital services, public administration with enhanced digital autonomy, businesses with opportunities and the digital market as a whole with unleashed innovation and higher competition, interoperability fits well with several SDGs.
Creating inclusive and open digital markets might be the main consequence of enforcing interoperability regulatory provisions. This way, all types of users would benefit from increased diversity (which goes beyond gender equality, to include age, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education, and national origin), thus reducing inequality (SDGs No. 5 & 10).
Moreover, interoperability also contributes to unleash innovation. In fact, while interoperability requires the establishment of common standards and basic sets of functionalities, it does not keep companies (regardless the size) from introducing innovative features on top of them. By increasing the level of market contestability, this tool would restore the current unbalanced relationship between smaller digital players and the large dominant digital companies. Right now, digital markets where incumbent companies benefit from large user bases are not contestable as they are extremely hard to challenge due to network effects, even when other companies and start-ups conceive better, more innovative products. In this, gatekeepers build closed ecosystems - “walled gardens” - through the lack of interoperability. If those incumbents are obliged to interoperate with competitors, challengers can directly offer their services to the existing user bases of those gatekeepers. Hence, the main spill-over of more innovative and competitive digital markets, other than economic growth (SDG No. 8), is a general incentive for companies to invest in research and development as well as human capital (SDGs No. 4 and 9).
Finally, international cooperation lays at the foundations of anti-monopoly digital regulatory efforts, which hold interoperability at their core, amongst other tools. This is one of the reasons why we are proposing such a diverse panel in the first place: to gather different stakeholders from almost all global regions that could bring their own national experience and scale it up to the next level by sharing best practices and insights with each other. We believe that knowledge and information sharing is crucial to improve the quality of any stakeholder’s policy work, which in turn would enhance the level of the discussion in their own geographical areas (SDG No. 17).
Description:
Interoperability is one of the basic principles on which the internet was built. In short, it is a technical mechanism for computing systems to work with one another. Well-known examples of interoperability include e-mail, telephone voice and messaging services — you can send an email or text message or call anyone else, regardless of the service providers, apps or devices you use.
The possibility for computing systems from different companies to be interoperable matters for market dynamics because when there is a lack of interoperability in a digital (and non-digital) market, it strengthens the winner-takes all aspects to the detriment of competition and innovation.
Digital markets where incumbent companies already benefit from large user bases are extremely hard to challenge due to the so-called “network effect” (i.e. the reliance on the sheer size of their existing user base to lock-in their users without having to compete on the merits of their products and services), even when other companies and start-ups conceive better, more innovative products. Gatekeepers build closed ecosystems - “walled gardens” - exploiting the lack of interoperability, and then use bundling and self-preferencing to expand them into other products and services.
Either users are pushed to use just one or a few, dominant platforms, or they are bound to adopt cumbersome workarounds, use multiple applications and devices that are incompatible with each other. This leads to a reduction in consumer choice and competition. At the same time, some companies are kept out of the market because they cannot compete with the already established user-base of the dominant player.
In this, interoperability represents a key tool and a chance for every country to gain digital sovereignty, restore opportunities amongst industry players of all sizes, unleash innovation as well as enhance consumer choice in the digital markets. Two years ago, we organised a workshop at the 2020 IGF to discuss and advocate how increased interoperability could be a future-proof way to solve some of the most intractable issues of the Internet platform market.
Now, interoperability has become a buzzword in the policy arena. Ranging from the ACCESS Act in the United States and the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, to the recent government-led agreements with the industry in China on digital markets, policymakers from all around the world have decided to take action.
Considering the worldwide consensus around the need to open up digital markets, we plan to host another interactive workshop allowing for a diverse set of stakeholders to contribute and discuss what happened over the last two years as well as address further actions to be taken in this domain. In times like this, it is vital for representatives of governments and industry as well as actors coming from other layers of the ICT community, such as consumer associations and academia, to share experiences and insights on this relevant issue.
In this workshop we plan to have a brief overview of what interoperability is and why it matters, followed by an intense exchange on the current policy scenarios regarding interoperability and platform regulation in the United States, the European Union, China, Africa and Brazil, which will then foster an open discussion amongst all participants.
Provisional Agenda:
- Introduction and welcome (OpenForum Europe)
- Tour de Table to encourage an interactive session
- What is interoperability? Why does it matter? (Dr. Ian Brown - moderator)
- U.S. & EU Policy scenarios on interoperability as a pro-competition tool (Dr. Fiona Scott Morton and Vittorio Bertola)
- Government-corporate agreements on Interoperability in China (Dr. Angela Zhang)
- Interoperability landscape in Africa (Dr. Alison Gillwald)
- Recent developments in Brazil (Dr. Luca Belli)
- Questions from moderator and attendees + discussion (All)
- Final statements from panellists (All)
- Final rapporteur’s wrap-up (Katarzyna Szymielewicz)
As a think tank working on digital policy-related issues, we address these questions in all our efforts. As the opportunities and challenges spilled over from the recent developments in the EU regulatory landscape hold the potential to affect internet governance and the experience of the internet for consumers and users globally, we hope to connect the dots between stakeholders represented at the IGF and the ongoing parallel discussions in several capitals worldwide.
A report of the workshop, possibly enriched by a set of actions/policies outlined in the panel, will be created for further distribution to all relevant stakeholders. Considering the high level of diversity in the panel, we hope to gather best regulatory practices and insights from around the world that could feed into follow-up events that may potentially go beyond Brussels as well as engagements with decision-makers across the world. In this, we strive to support other stakeholders in their advocacy efforts in their own countries or geographical areas.
Finally, we believe that this workshop represents an opportunity to build cross-border bridges and connections with our peers in other parts of the world, which falls well in line with the IGF Mandate outlined in the Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda.
Hybrid Format: In the panel proposed, we have a balanced distribution of onsite-offsite presence. Specifically, three out of five speakers, alongside both moderator and rapporteur, will attend in person. Therefore, we need to ensure a smooth interaction between the in-person panellists and the two speakers joining online, as well as the offsite audience.
We have thorough experience in organising and participating in hybrid events. As all event organisers know however, this format does not come without challenges. In our experience, preparing all the speakers and the moderator from the start by building the hybrid elements into the session planning and having a dedicated resource to deal with any potential issues (everything from input gathering and internet connection issues to overlaps) is the way to overcome these challenges.
That is why OFE will set up a team to manage both the audience and the online speakers for the whole duration of the panel, supporting the moderator in gathering relevant questions from the chat and assisting the online speakers with troubleshooting. Clearly, the OFE team (whose presence will be equally divided on- and off-site) will be in constant communication with the moderator.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.