Talk:Economy – How ICT can foster growth and development in Europe? – PL 04 2014

This is the discussion site for the session Economy – How ICT can foster growth and development in Europe

To enter your comments below please click on "edit" at the upper right side of the site:

Background:

• Innovations by digital SMEs have a key role to play in securing long-term, sustainable economic growth in Europe. Yet Europe’s IT-SMEs often remain small, vulnerable to international competition and represent only a tiny portion of international trade. Rather than establishing large state-funded IT/internet projects – as various politicians have suggested in reaction to US intelligence surveillance – we need to find ways of maximizing the competitiveness of European digital companies, particularly SMEs, whilst maintaining an open Internet. SMEs are the backbone of the European economy, crucial for jobs and drivers of innovation. A range of challenges and opportunities could be discussed in this context, with a particular focus on the internationalisation of SMEs and access to (emerging) markets.

• Crossborder interference with parts of the infrastructure of the Internet, specifically with traffic- routing and at the interface between the network and the content, effects Internet users’ ability to access or provide content and services. The concern is not just with outages or security incidents, but with actions to block, filter, divert or intercept content in one Member State, that may impact on users who are based in another Member State. This may result in cross-¬border (human rights) implications for access to content and information carried by that traffic.

Topic:

Geographic Top-Level Domains (GeoTLDs) between Profitableness and Public Interest

Description:

• The global regulatory organization for Internet-Domain-Names and IP-Addresses ICANN has recently opened up the Domain-Name-System (DNS) to around 1000 new extensions, so-called top-level domains (TLDs). The process for expanding this key part of the Internet’s infrastructure had been evolved and decided in a bottom-up multi-stakeholder process over the last 9 years, including businesses, governments and Internet users.

• This revolution in addressing resources on the Internet has vast implications on the future usage of the Internet. The new geographic TLDs (GeoTLDs) such as .berlin, .paris and .zurich should be discussed as example of the stress field between sustainable profitableness in the operation of new TLDs and the Public Interest. As most of the GeoTLDs are startup companies hot topics include Governance, Safety and Data Protection issues and the gap between a contract with US-based ICANN and local legislation and regulation.

Speaker Background

Dirk Krischenowski, Founder&CEO dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG (.berlin Top-Level Domain)

As the founder and general manager of dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG, Dirk Krischenowski spearheads the initiative of .berlin since 2004. Since then he promoted regional namespaces for cities and regions and thus initiated a worldwide trend, which cities like New York (.nyc), London (.london), and Rio Je Janeiro (.rio) followed in creating for their respective TLD. He is the author of articles and studies on GeoTLDs and a regular speaks at conferences worldwide on the political and regulatory challenges of starting a new namespace such as .berlin.