Future of the Internet Initiative’ Opportunity Mapping
Introduction A.Background and Purpose
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IntroductionA.Background and PurposeThe Berkman Center for Internet & Society (“Berkman”) and the World Economic Forum (“the Forum”) have entered into a collaboration built upon a shared commitment to fostering an open, interoperable, and affordable Internet, serving the global public interest. In this collaboration, Berkman is a research partner whose research capacity and network of academic centers will help the Forum scope and plan its Future of the Internet Initiative (“FII”) with a focus on building knowledge and digital problem-solving capacity among decision-makers and leaders from both the private and public sector through the development of resources, educational programs, and training modules. An initial contribution to both the scoping of the FII and building educational resources is the development of an “opportunity map” in order to to create a shared foundational understanding of key opportunities and challenges in selected areas of key interest to the FII. In particular, this opportunity map identifies areas where the Forum and its collaborators could meaningfully contribute in the next year and beyond, leveraging the unique characteristics of the Forum’s platforms. At this stage, this document is intended as an internal “navigation aid”; a public-facing version of the document could be created after peer review and a consultation process. Overall, the FII has identified five broad tracks of activity: (1) Governance on the Internet (focusing on policy and societal change through multistakeholder mechanisms, including issues of data localization, national and regional digital strategies, multistakeholder collaboration, code-based solutions, and the NETmundial initiative); (2) cyber-crime (focusing on combating cyber-crime, raising awareness and supporting resilience, and developing public-private partnerships to develop strategy and catalyze action); (3) Internet for all (focusing on developing best practices for Internet deployment and adoption that balance private and public investment in infrastructure); (4) improving information for decision-makers (focusing on providing better and more updated information to decision-makers on key issues relating to the future of the Internet); and (5) digital transformation of business models (focusing on the challenges and opportunities for businesses that the digital transformation creates). Within this framework, the Forum asked Berkman to develop a map exploring four topical areas relating to the first three tracks: (1) data localization; (2) national/regional digital strategies; (3) Internet deployment; and (4) cyber-crime. Ultimately, within each of these areas of Internet policy, the Forum and the FII are seeking to understand how they can contribute to the development of better decision-making, both in the public and private spheres, on these critical issues. B.MethodologyOur mapping explores concrete opportunities for engagement in four selected areas of interest that are part of the larger FII agenda: (1) data localization; (2) national and regional digital strategies; (3) improving Internet deployment; and (4) cyber-crime. We explore each of these areas in sequence below. For each area of interest and associated section below, we used a mixed-method approach including desk research, literature review, and database searches to gather relevant information.5 For the section on national and regional digital strategies, we constrained our detailed analysis to only those strategies from the countries with the twenty largest economies by GDP. From this research we began by cataloging key public-private partnerships, keeping track of several data points relevant for identifying opportunities and methods of engagement in the context of the FII. This catalogue of raw mapping data is available in full in the included appendices. Where relevant, the appendices include for each partnership the following:
Understanding that the purpose of this map is to identify opportunities for engagement, we operated in a bottom-up fashion, using raw mapping data as a foundation for a narrative analysis centered around on-the-ground opportunities for engagement. From this raw mapping data we made observations of emerging real-world trends, and supplemented those observations with analysis from other academics and industry observers, where applicable. The narrative analysis below describes these key thematic trends in each of the four areas, highlighting opportunities for concrete engagement and prototypical public-private partnerships and entities whose actions significantly shape the ecosystem. Identifying spaces for concrete engagement in a rapidly evolving policy sphere inherently introduces a challenge: the environment is likely to shift as soon as it is captured. Instead of focusing on the more granular and short-term aspects of these ongoing debates, we have instead focused on the bigger picture, in order to provide a more useful document that helps the reader understand some of the tectonic forces shaping the policy landscape. Rather than describing every such partnership within the narrative analysis, we highlight prototypical partnerships that are representative of opportunities for Forum and FII engagement, and we direct the reader to the appendices for additional information. Download 274.55 Kb. Share with your friends:
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