New business models and the Internet – WS 02 2017
6 June 2017 | 14:30 - 16:00 | Ballroom II, Swissotel, Tallinn, Estonia |
Programme overview 2017
The Internet is constantly evolving. New business models are being developed in parallel. In this session we will explore the interdependences between technological and economic innovation and discuss their effects on the Internet ecosystem.
Keywords
- Internet - Business Models - Openness - Innovation - Disruption - Infrastructure Investments - Customer-centric approach
Session description
We will tackle four key questions in this session:
1) What are new business models and what is their relation to the open Internet? 2) How does an increasingly mobile Internet affect business models? 3) How do we assure sufficient investment in the deployment of new technologies? 4) What are the alternatives to data based business models?
Format
There will be no panelists. Instead two moderators will work with the whole room, everybody is invited to discuss. In order to assure an interesting debate the Org Team will identify key resource persons that will be asked to kick start the discussion with input statements.
People
Focal Point:
- Thomas Grob (Deutsche Telekom AG)
Subject Matter Expert (SME):
- Frederick Donck (ISOC)
Key Participants
- Mark Bohannon, Redhat
- Christian Borggreen, CCIA
- Gonzalo Lopez Barajas Huder, Telefonica
- Konstantinos Komaitis, ISOC
Moderators
- Caroline Greer, Cloudflare
- Erika Mann, GNSO Council
Remote Moderator
- to be selected by eurodig office
Organising Team (Org Team)
- Christian Borggreen, CCIA
- Gonzalo Lopez Barajas Huder, Telefonica
- Marco Hogewoning, Ripe
Reporter
- Thomas Grob (Deutsche Telekom AG)
Current discussion, conference calls, schedules and minutes
See the discussion tab on the upper left side of this page.
- Kick Off call on 20 April – agreed on working title and session format
- 2nd Org Team call on 27 April – agreed on keywords and disagreed on session description
- 3rd Org Team call om 15 May - agreed on key questions for the workshop, started identifying key ressources
- 4th call: if needed, not scheduled yet
Video record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBZF5z2sbe0
Messages
- New Business Models: Open Source software and permission less innovation are central pillars of innovation on the Internet.
- Handling of personal data by business: We need a different approach as there is a trust problem. Re-marketing of old customer data is not a viable new business model. To gain and build trust customers have to understand what is happening with their data and give their consent, i.e. opt-in and not opt-out.
- Why is European innovation not gaining scale?: The European digital market is (still) to fragmented to call it a single market. And European enterprises suffer from over regulation. Less regulation will favour innovation, not more regulation. Network effects need to be understood in order to gain global relevance.
Transcript
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, we shall now commence with the parallel sessions. Please locate the correct room of your session. Do not hesitate to ask a conference assistant to help you locate it.
>> –– 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
>> Tallinn, Estonia.
>> Can we get mics?
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the conference programme will continue in one minute. We kindly request that you enter the room and take your seats. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference programme will continue in one minute. We kindly request you to enter the room and take your seats.
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the conference programme will continue in one minute. We kindly request you enter the room and take your seats.
>> Hello, can you hear us?
>> Check, check.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Testing. Okay, let's make a start. So this session is new business models and the Internet. Hope you're all in the right session. I'm Caroline Greer. I work for a company called Cloudflare. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. In fitting with this workshop it's a relatively early new stage company, 6, 7 years old. Quite innovative, you know. Founded when we came together from Harvard Business School, went to San Francisco, set up the business, and now we're operational globally. So we do Web acceleration, Web performance, cybersecurity.
So we have DDoS protection tools and CDN type service. A little fitting about where some of these new business Internet models emanate from and how this business grows. I'm co‑moderating with Erika Mann. She is a GNSO counselor and also works for Covington & Burling. We have no panel. Also a very innovative session. Experimental, let's see how it goes. The idea is that you're all the panelists in and of yourselves so get ready to participate. We want this to be as open and free flow as possible. We have a number of key participants that have been identified to help stimulate the discussion of certain moments in time when they feel it most appropriate. So those people are Mark Bohannon from Redhat. Christian Borggreen from CCIA Brussels. These are in the front row. Gonzalo Lopez-Barajas Huder, and Konstantinos Komaitis from Internet Society.
He was the focal point I think towards the end, we're going to spend maybe 10 minutes. We'll talk about some of the key takeaways we got from the session, some of the summaries. He'll be doing a report. I think this will inform the reports that will be produced as a result of the session. We also had a subject matter expert Frederick Donck from ISOC but unfortunately he couldn't be here today but he also helped pull the panel together. Behave hashish, our Remote Moderator.
So free flow. What we want to do is maybe frame the discussion, put some context around it. This topic could go very broad, very wide. We can have a very broad discussion but to try and put a frame around it Erika will start talking about some new established businesses, players we see on the market already so a lot of companies you're all very familiar with that we probably heard of and then talk about some new players that are coming into the markets across the globe, identify new technologies and trends we're seeing I think overall is a lot of business models are data driven so in some way it's innovative use of data or information. The question to be posed maybe at the end is are there other alternatives to this type of new business Internet model. Difficult to see at this time but maybe some people have ideas as well. Having this debate in Estonia, super innovative, very digitally savvy. Region country.
Why is this the case? Towards the end of the discussion we'll look at environmental factors around what is encouraging certain regions or countries like Estonia to be innovative. Is the policy Framework? The mind set? Is it an educational scheme starting from school age, is it the scale of the country. Look at different business models, responding to maybe an incidence that's triggered some need to become more innovative. So, yeah, that's kind of high level stuff. I think I've covered the intro so maybe hand over to Erika to kick off with some of the Framework stuff.
>> ERIKA MANN: Yeah, thank you so much. Caroline already gave a short introduction. This is a very short introduction into the topic and we did a quick check this morning with a report. You want to probably have a look at. The report that just came out a few weeks ago and then you just type in Mika Internet trends 2017. It will pop up immediately. It's one of probably the greatest resources each year which gives you a fantastic overview about the industry. By the way it not just gives you good overview about the industry but it tells you as well, what is missing and sometimes what is missing tells you more than what you find there. For example you will find some missing data about Europe. You'll find nothing about the Domain Name industry for example which is already indicators about how the industry is actually observed so have a look at this.
So we thought it would be nice to look at two phases. One phase we call the new established players, which is probably all of you here in the room. And then we love to talk about what we call the new kids on the block. Some of them are not really new name, NIDRR, but at least it gives you some kind of impression about what is going on. We're not going into the details because we have the experts here and we assume you're all experts in one way or another so it's not our role to dot this. What do we call the established new business models and the new established players?
For example, Skype, Spotify from the game industry, King.com, players like Alibaba, WeChat, the more well known, Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay, but even a company like a car manufacturer like Tesla so there are many models one has to look into which are on the market for quite a while and which we either use or we have heard about.
And then of course the older ones, the previous generation, the Telecom operators which moved into this business as well. Some more than the others.
Who are the new players? So we looked at some of the more interesting trends. Blockchain for example. There's big players, there's some small players. Some of the models are not even tested in some markets in particular in firms which work more in logistical environments, the blockchain markets are probably already better tested. Artificial intelligence sometimes in combination with virtual reality, augmented reality, sometimes stand alone.
Virtual reality certainly already more on the market. The artificial more behind the scene. Tested more in professional environments. Drones, on the marked and sometimes even used for commercial use already, driverless cars.
Health care environment, in particular the available technologies which people wear, but for diagnostic as well, in particular environments where they're used on the more individual way, so not less in the environment for hospitals, but more what customers use and select individually. Mobile payments, gaming, quantum computing which is more a topic which will probably take a while before it becomes a market, accepted models, too expensive simply, so it will take much more time.
New partnerships and alliances we see play out sometimes between the established player and between newcomers. Online advertisement when you look at the Mika report the one which I mentioned you will see she reports about a great shift from the more established market to mobile markets. And geotagging and what one calls hyperlocal, which is the tiny microlocal markets which are becoming more accessible for users and for customers when they move around streets in their home market or somewhere elsewhere they are. Back to you.
>> CAROLINE GREER: What else were not mentioned? Voice recognition technologies, online advertising you've mentioned. The shift to mobile in general, right? I mean, it's really changing some new business models and new thinking on that. I guess a big issue that sort of confronts all of this is the issue of trust. Erika and I had a discussion when we were preparing for the panel, to what extent is this an issue? Is it an issue in some certain regions but others it's not? Do we need to work at the trust issue in order to embrace some of these new Internet business models?
To what extent are these new business models consumer centric? So are companies responding to a need that they see? Or are they almost creating a need that we then realize couldn't live without this type thing, so how are companies approaching that type thing. Cybersecurity, encryption, but knowing that encryption is enabling some of these new Internet business models and maybe has addressed the trust issue. We wouldn't be doing online banking for example without encryption, engaging in some of the communication mechanisms that we do as well.
And finally I think maybe just I think Christian maybe will touch on this and report he wants to bring up but the extent to which companies layer as they go along so maybe a company starts with a core product, over time they start to layer and build and add new features and services to the product so that's part of the innovation life cycle if you like.
So, yeah, I mean, like I said at the beginning, a lot of it is data driven. I don't think we can escape that but more over it's intelligent use of data. Data is just a raw product. You need to be able to do something with this information and use it intelligently.
So maybe that's enough to frame the discussion. We don't want to talk too long about this. Super broad debate as you can see and we can go at this from many angles so did none want to kick off with early observations or comments or thoughts?
>> ERIKA MANN: Christian, you want to kick off?
>> CAROLINE GREER: I'm not sure if it's working.
>> ERIKA MANN: When I tested it, it did not work. Can we get somebody maybe to help us with the mics?
>> CHRISTIAN BORGGREEN: I didn't plan to stand up, but here I am. I'm Christian Borggreen. I'm with the Computer and Communications Industry Association in Brussels, and some of the things we're seeing, it's sort of a subcategory of the new kids on the block. It's what we call RIAs, Rich Interaction Applications. This is a new phenomena that is children of the Internet. Applications that are running thanks to the Internet, and it's evolving very rapidly. We know different apps such as iMessage, Viber, Snapchat. If you're younger, you probably know more of them. If you're my age or older, maybe not. And there's very little academic evidence in terms of these kind of new applications these RIAs. There was a study released by a German academic institute, and they found, they looked at a number of these applications around the world over 15 years and they found on average these applications have nine different features like online translation, money transfers, chat functions, et cetera.
And they have a huge impact on economic development. Also sometimes they have disaster relief or e-Health or online education elements to them, so it's really gaining a value for users beyond just GDP figures. But one of the interesting points in this WIK report is that for every 10% increase in the use of these RIA, these Rich Interaction Applications, there was a .33 increase of GDP, the equivalent of 5 trillion Euros. It's quite incredible the benefits economically and also socioeconomically. The question is, and I think this is interesting to discussion, these new applications. They're very different, they keep evolving/but how should they be considered from a regulatory point of view? Because it's easy to say it sort of looks like something else we know, we used to regulate them for decades this way. That could have a way of killing innovation and killing the development. Thank you.
>> ERIKA MANN: Thank you, Christian. Somebody else want to add or make a different point? Yes, please.
>> MARK BOHANNON: Thank you, Erika. Mark Bohannon with Redhat. I want to thank you for that. My head is spinning from the dynamics I have to think about here. But I do encourage everyone to read the Mary Meeker Internet Trends report. It's one of the best ones she's done. Rather than flip through the 285 slides, I encourage you to watch the 45-minute YouTube she put out. It's a lot more digestible and interesting and she uses slides very wet. I'm with Redhat. I want to thank Erika for not putting us in the category of old boys that aren't doing anything. As some of you know, we are the world's most successful company delivering open source software solutions primarily data enterprises. Critical infrastructures, Governments, large institutions delivering a variety of these kinds of services and new technologies and new approaches.
We started revolutionizing the software industry about 15 years ago but we didn't do it alone. We did it because we had an approach to open innovation that drew from the communities of software developers around the world doing incredible stuff. We're still very involved in those communities. We feel they are very important to our ecosystem, to our innovation. And if there's anything that I think unites all the companies, almost all the companies, that Erika ran through, it is that they were using and are using opensource as the way of building out their services, infrastructure, with the goal of trying to create network effects, of creating the broadest array of users they can to sustain what they are doing.
And I think at the heart of this discussion is that we're moving away from a very traditional notion of innovation to one of open innovation, where collaboration is absolutely essential, where we're moving away from the notion that just one company has the best ideas. In fact, the best ideas often come from outside your company, and do you have an innovation ecosystem that fits into that?
Quite often the business plan matters more than the technology you have, so this is a great discussion. Look forward to sharing more about that and thank you for bringing this topic up today. It's very important.
>> ERIKA MANN: Thank you so much. One recommendation I can make talking about Redhat, you put out very early, I don't remember the year but I posted about it on Facebook, on a public Post so you can find it, you produced one of the best videos about what we call the pioneering character of industries, because it makes a short, it's a short clip, relatively long actually about 3 minutes but it goes through the different phases in industry so the airplane, the Telecom, the railways, and everybody each time there was a group of people typically the established saying, you can't do it.
And this is just fun actually to watch, because history repeats. Each time something new comes, we will have this kind of dispute again and again so I think we have to get used to it 679 it's just part of human nature.
You want to wait or come in, Gonzalo? Come in any time.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Hello. Thanks, Erika. I am Konstantinos Komaitis, and I'm with The Internet Society. For those of you who do not know The Internet Society, we're a global organisation and we sort of represent the Internet. We were created by the very people who created the Internet.
I would like to add to what Mark said. One other feature, a common feature of these companies is they operate on a technology that supports innovation, so this idea that there is really no central authority that you need to go and ask for permission when you want to create something on the Internet. The Internet is designed in such a way that anyone with a great idea can put it out there around then it's up to the market to pick it up or -- and make the best use out of it. This is a unique feature of the Internet that we don't necessarily see in other technologies and it's allowed all these brand new innovations to come about and all these companies to thrive and change markets, provide new choice to consumers, create new services and always keep challenging themselves in order to be able and innovate more and more and more. So I would like to put this out there because it is very important to understand the technology but also to understand how the Internet would be like if all these companies had to actually go and ask for permission in order to be able and exist. So thank you very much.
>> ERIKA MANN: Gonzalo?
>> GONZALO LOPEZ-BARAJAS HUDER: My name is Gonzalo Lopez-Barajas Huder, and I work for Telefónica. We have over 350 companies in the U.K., Germany, Spain and almost every single Latin American country. Talking about permissionless innovation and how the mobile Internet is changing, the Internet there's certainly a trend we're seeing these basically Internet is now turning mobile. According to data from smart insights, we have seen that basically in almost every country, at least 70% of the time we spend on the Internet we spend it on mobile devices. That's a figure for the U.S. but it's not just happening in the U.S. In Spain, for example, it's around 69%. In Mexico, which you can claim it's a completely different country and different approach, it's 75%, and in Tunisia, it's up to 90%.
But it's not only that we access through our mobile handsets. If we look at the time we're accessing the Internet on our mobile hand sets, almost 90% of the time we're doing it through applications. We're not just using browsers, we're always using applications that are located in our handsets. And basically this is having a significant effect on how we use and how we approach the Internet.
And one of the first reports that already commented on the effects, and from Mozilla which is called winners and losers of the app economy. Basically they claim that the permissionless innovation of the Internet is changing because basically the editorial process has changed because everybody has to go through application stores and you are then subject to the terms and conditions of those application stores. Moreover if you look for example at the economy of the Internet and how wealth has been distributed, you will see that basically all the applications are produced mainly in China, in the U.S. and basically all the revenues that are being generated in the Internet to those applications are being diverted to those countries.
And this effect is even more pronounced in some countries that for example do not have PayPal which it's not operative in some countries, in some countries in Africa for example, which that means then that these applications cannot be really produced or I mean people do not have the incentives to produce those applications because they cannot benefit as they don't have access to payment services.
For example another additional report which I would like to comment, it's a report that was generated this year in "The New York Times" which is called: Clearing Out the Application Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier. And basically the author here claims that governments are pushing on application stores to block access to some applications so that the most easy way for such Governments to do censorship on the Internet so my question is if the Governments are able already to apply such big constraints to application stores, the power that these application stores have is really, really great, and it's not just seen by these, for example, articles. We are already seeing some movements by Governments for example Germany already published a white paper on online platforms.
We saw last week the French regulator publishing a report on what is the effect of handsets on the open Internet, and basically they look at what the effects of mobile handsets is having on the open Internet and what effect application stores is having on the limitless Internet, so I will leave it there.
>> ERIKA MANN: Interesting point, particularly on the apps, as well, and how they might inadvertently serve as a choke point on the Internet.
>> ERIKA MANN: We have Marco over here.
>> Marco Pacini from Google. Quite a different perspective like the one you heard a few seconds ago in terms from of course our point of view. We are seeing a lot of applications booming in Europe with just a celebrated, the success of a lot of the European entrepreneurs, thanks to the new apps economy really can find incredible opportunities and amazing audiences and that's also why we're investing a lot in companies in Madrid, in Warsaw, all over in Europe to make sure that these entrepreneurs can meet, can share experience, can really go.
The point on censorship and apps market is I would like to understand a bit better but from our point of view is actually the other way around, actually is thanks to the possibility to work together with important companies like Apple, like Google. Application can in a sense shield behind some of the best practice that we build in the last years actually, the Gneiss is one of these examples, Global Network Initiative is something we launched a few years ago with Microsoft and Yahoo! to set clear standards in respect of fundamental rights that we want to meet in all our platforms. So, for example, on Android, of course, we stay very, very, very closely to these important principles that you sign and therefore we won't accept any kind of censorship or any kind of control.
That's also why, for example, we're very strong in defending encryption and finding also the right balance between security and the development of technology. We believe, still believe that encryption is a way to keep services free and to keep users, to have user trust on this. So I would say that, of course, these are a lot of important challenges, but if we focus on the new business models, we see ourselves more an enablers than gatekeepers, and that's actually how we leave our engagement in Android, keeping the platform open, allowing different markets to be present on the platform and working together with both OEM and carrier in order to be successful as an ecosystem.
I don't see this as a conflict between different stakeholders but I see really like an ecosystem where we're all working in order to make successful and sustainable the new business models.
>> ERIKA MANN: You want to come back? Or somebody else in the room? You're all hiding. It's not allowed in this session.
>> CAROLINE GREER: No. You're all panelists, remember. Yes, please.
>> PCS. I see one of the problems that's looming is that people are getting very upset about their personal data being used by other people, and they want to get some of that value themselves, not just the value of the access to the free services. And things like GDPR and the need to get consent to shared data, how is that going to affect these business models that are relying on matching together data from different sources?
>> ERIKA MANN: You would like to come in? Please.
>> Yes. We have seen on surveys for example that around 3% of the people surveyed were not concerned on how their personal data was being used, so that means that we have really a trust problem on the way that businesses, Governments and other parties are using this personal data. And basically, I think that people is concerned about businesses using the data because they don't understand how the companies are using this data and the approaches we're having to this data.
And basically, companies can claim that with the terms and services, we explain everything perfectly and customers are aware how data is treated but that's not really true. There are some studies for example from Carnegie Mellon saying if we were to really look at all the terms and conditions of the services that we are using, we'd be spending 75 days per annum to fully understand all these terms and conditions, so basically we really need a different approach how data is being used by companies.
At Telefónica, since basically we are having our customers pay for services, we are taking a different approach for the data because we don't need the data to make a business model. We are being paid by the services that our customers are paying us so basically, what we want is to be providing customers with value of the data and giving them back the value of the data that we are using,.
And we have launched a programme which is called AURA, and it's based on three capabilities. The first one is it's based on cognitive intelligence, and we're mixing the speaking platform with all the data that we have from the customers. We will enable our customers to access all the services and be for example adding more data to their plan or configuring their wi-fi at home to be for example being able to do an access, a guest for access the wi‑fi at home or to shutter the wi-fi so nobody has access. That will be simply performed with access to data and this cognitive platform. Additionally we're providing access to the customer's information to see all the information these customers have, what have they been changing on the privacy settings and all the different things they've been doing.
The third part is the use we are going to be providing to that data. Basically our aim here is that customers are going to be empowered to decide how data is going to be used, and we will share whatever we get from those data, we will share the benefits of those data with them. For example, in Latin America, the banking system is very, very limited so when people access or try to access to get a credit they might find they have better interest rates because they don't have a current history. So if they were able to provide the information and credit score from the Telecom companies because we have a very long relation with them, if they will be willing to provide this information with the banks, they might be able to get cheaper credits from these banks. That's how it would be of course a decision from customers.
We, for example, will enable them to access information, for example, on -- for security of data. A bank might ask is this customer actually being for example -- because I had a credit card transaction and with the data we have on localization, we will tell them that yes, he's close by to the place that you're telling me. Or, no, he's at a different location. So actually we will never really share the data but we will be providing insights to the customer data and only to those that the customers will be enabling us.
Another example will be for example we have made an agreement with the United Nations in order to have studies on how diseases are being spread so those customers willing to share their location information will be contributing to a model that will help to predict how diseases are being spread.
And of course, the most important thing here is that all the data that we are willing to share with these partners is customers the ones that are deciding which data is to be shared and we will be sharing some benefits with them.
[Off microphone ]
>> Yes, hello? Hello? I'm coming from Switzerland, private netizen we could say. I have just a quick question for the gentleman from Telefónica. This is an opt in or an opt out? That means your customers have to give permission for each use of their data or do you have to secure, did you get a blanket assumption that all uses are okay?
[Off microphone]
I'd just like to comment on our experience in Switzerland a little bit. There are others in the room from Switzerland so they can tell a different story, if they like. We have our old post and telegraph operator now called Swisscom, decided it would enter into an agreement with a local publishing company and a third party and this public -- this old public telephone and telegraph company decided it would be okay to contribute their 15 or 20 years of customer information to this new consortium with these advertising and newspaper people. And I don't know who blew the whistle on them, but eventually we got all letters saying: If you don't like the Swisscom to be providing your customer information to this new advertising consortium, you can write to this address and you can opt out.
Additionally, we have a very old and very respected cooperative grocery chain in Switzerland which for years has been collecting data customers at the cash register showing a particular identification. Their purchases were being recorded, and this company then used this data to help them gauge demand for different products. Then the outgoing CEO decided he would start a customized personalized rebate programme based on this collection of data which this well respected company had been collecting for a good 30 years or, so I imagine and in protest, many people cut up and sent back in their cards, which this company had decided it would now start to use for personalized selling and tracking.
The last instance is our national railway company. They have just recently changed to using a single identification card with an embedded chip, and they would also like to use this travel information, where you travel from point A to point B, how often you travel, where are you expected to be traveling, and they would like to use this also for their new marketing.
So in the context of this discussion here, what are the new business models? What we see is that the dot com bubble in 2002, 2003, where many of these companies had to survive by changing to a customer data model is now being followed by some of these older companies, perhaps not Telefónica but many of the old utilities are now actively selling their customer data or remarketing it as a way, as a new business model.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Those are good points. And I think to really understand the trust issues, sorry, it's how much our consumer user behavior is changing so are people really objecting to this? Or do they see some perceived value in this new service, some new benefit they can get out of this? Or are they really backing off and saying this is too much for me, I don't trust this. So therein lies the crux. User behaviors.
>> ERIKA MANN: I think what, we had a pre-discussion to this discussion actually the two of us and we thought about the examples which you mention not precisely about Switzerland but how the traditional industries actually are embracing these new models. The question is: Can it be done in a way that customers feel informed from early on and can decide, do they want to be part of such a model or not.
I think that's probably the main part for this industry. How do they do it? Are customers informed? And can they take an informed decision to be part of the --
>> CAROLINE GREER: Transparency.
>> ERIKA MANN: Your examples are actually fantastic, and I'm sure will help shaping this debate in the future, at least for this group I'm pretty sure here. We have two more. You want to add something to this, or you want us to move on?
>> With this platform, basically the customers will be asked if they want to take part, so it's an opt‑in. And customers will decide if they want to join, and if they don't say, they will not be -- I mean, they have to explicitly say they want to take part into this --
>> No, definitely not.
>> ERIKA MANN: You're talking about Telefónica?
>> He's asking me about my examples.
>> ERIKA MANN: No, no, he's talking about --
>> In all of these examples which I gave the customers was not consulted beforehand. They were notified if they did not want their data to be shared, they could object and write a letter to the company. In a third case with this grocery chain, there was no chance to comment.
The company basically realized late in the game that they had made a very bad decision with over 30 years of customer trust, and they resulted basically to denial and cover up and trying to bring in some questionable third parties which said they were treating this data responsibly but as we say, the horse had already left the barn.
>> CAROLINE GREER: So did this new service take off? Was it successful?
>> How do you define success?
>> CAROLINE GREER: Well, true. I don't know.
>> ERIKA MANN: Just to be clear, Telefónica --
>> I would say in all three cases, each of these companies which had been well respected and had a good reputation lost reputation, and got bad publicity. At the end of the day, they may have gained useful customer data which they will now go on to share and generate profits from. Is that a success? You tell me.
>> I was just commenting on our proposition basically. The fundamental base is the customer is empowered to decide if they want to share the data or not and on a specific basis. It's not that general consent. You will be asked for every single case if they want to do it or not, and if they don't answer, the data will not be shared. So our proposition is to empower customers to decide what's done with their data.
>> On your point before on Data Protection, of course in less than a year, we'll have this very, very encompassing European Protection Framework which will be clarifying a lot and which will be making more clear if it's not clear enough that consumers need to give their consent, and if not, companies will get a big stick and financial penalties, so there will be more clarity there.
And your example from Switzerland, they're incredible. Unfortunately we still hear these examples and companies who don't take privacy seriously, this would be seen publicly. I think the beauty in terms of the model from Telefónica is that there should be different models because people want different models for the Internet.
And that is also the beauty of the Internet. There are so many different business models and consumers should have clarity in their choice in what they want to choose. For instance when it comes to apps if you want, if you value privacy you probably want to have encryption. That's a choice you can have often for free, monetary as a user. You can have that kind of privacy.
And of course when it comes to online apps differently from a mobile provider but the choice is just one click away. You can just pick, if you don't like that service because you don't like Snapchat one day, you want to use Viber, WeChat whatever, you can do that, one click away and it's a little more difficult to change between different providers. Thank you.
>> ERIKA MANN: Okay, friends, different topic. What would you like to talk about?
>> I have another suggestion for an emerging business model on the Internet, it's face recognition. I was at a presentation about six weeks ago for a developer conference, and it turns out again this same National railway company is now testing face recognition technology so that their conductors as they go through the train to verify the tickets don't necessarily need to look at the card. They will hold up their camera, they will take a picture of your face, and because it matches certain conditions in their database from how you look, they can see if you have a valid ticket for this train journey.
I think we will see more -- we already have many instances of law enforcement agencies using automatic face recognition in public surveillance cameras to see if they can pick people out of a crowd. We know that there was a little bit pushback a couple years ago with Google Glass. Google is here, yes? When Google Glass was trying to introduce this model that would allow people of all kinds to walk down the street with glasses on, taking pictures of the people coming to meet them, and we already know that Facebook, for instance, is using face recognition in anonymously submitted photographs to determine who is in the picture even without their consent.
So I think that face recognition will be also a very important new business model. How it will be used, I'm not sure, but I think the ability to make a good business and to turn a profit again I think will be becoming increasingly clear, because it's for instance for the train company, it will be efficiency gain. They can send essentially robotic conductors through the train. They don't need to pay their personnel and they can verify everybody who is on the train using their face technology.
>> ERIKA MANN: Somebody would love to talk about this? Yes, please.
>> I know one company that is face.com.
>> ERIKA MANN: You have to speak up a bit.
>> So there is a company face.com. This is acquired in 2012 by Facebook.com. What this company was doing, when you were in a conference you can actually up load a photo of a guy you want to get the social information about, their Facebook page, or LinkedIn page but you this application has been closed by Facebook because of the privacy reasons. This is how after some time some company evolves. Some other company can acquire and close that company, these applications. This is one of the things I want to talk about.
If that something evolves, a different company can also close those applications.
>> ERIKA MANN: Again I think it can be good and it can be problematic. It depends on the environment, how it is used, how it is introduced, how customers are inform about it. I personally would love to have something like this if it would make my life easier but I would want to know about it. I don't want to have hidden agendas which I would not know, but otherwise I wouldn't be against something like this.
Do you want to say something? Or somebody else? Marco? Shall I take -- and then I come back to you? Or you want to go immediately? Go ahead.
>> So just very quickly, I personally am not sure how I feel about facial recognition, but that's another story. However, the issue of trust I think here is going to be key in moving forward. And we will see this demand for higher security and transparency and how all these services are used to increase.
Technology is moving very fast. It creates a lot of efficiency and I think this was the point behind the whole idea with the train, but at the same time, users are starting also to demand much more in terms of "you're using my data." Right now you're able to use facial recognition to determine whatever you want to determine. How are you going to be using it? It's what Erika alluded to, the whole idea of it might be used in whatever sense is not within what is an acceptable norm is really dangerous and we need to be a little bit careful. When these technologies roll out we need to call up those technology companies and understand exactly why they're being -- how they're used, why they're being used, and what sort of security mechanisms are there to enable the users to be able to trust them.
>> ERIKA MANN: Marco, you want to come in?
[Off microphone]
I'm doubtful it's working.
>> Okay. There are a series of considerations to make very quickly, but for example, made the example of Google Glass was not a huge success because it was not maybe the right moment, because there was not a very clear business model. We are thinking now the process in more of a business to business environment so again, even from this kind of success you can learn something but I want to assure that there cannot -- we cannot think about business model in a vacuum, not considering ethical norms, what the user wants, and the legislative Framework so I think it's more bottom-up process than a top-down.
There is no one that can come with an idea and impose idea without considering these other elements that are made.
>> CAROLINE GREER: You posed a very important point on ethics. I think data ethics is not a new topic but it's certainly one that's being discussed more and more. If you look at artificial intelligence or algorithms, how do we use these things ethically. How do companies develop these products and services ethically. Yeah.
Anybody else? Olivier? Yes?
>> ERIKA MANN: Okay, sorry, go first, and then over here.
>> Yes, thank you. Olivier LeBlanc. I'm going to wear this hat for this question. It's just Olivier for this question. I have a question that's been in my head for a while. I guess everybody knows about unicorns, privately held companies that are worth more than 1 billion that are startups less than five years old. There's about 196 of them apparently now. We only have a handful of European ones. When you look at the former unicorns, the ones that went into IPO, why is that? Why do we not have unicorns in Europe? This is crazy. I don't know, maybe somebody's got the answer, but I don't know if it's because of regulation or legislation, or because we all go to the states if we want a unicorn, I don't know, or to China.
But U.S., number one. China, number two. Europe, nowhere.
>> ERIKA MANN: And we have a big unicorn sitting here even in global scale. Telefónica certainly is one. But of course, in the face, an older face.
>> But unicorns are privately held but they're actually listed on --
>> ERIKA MANN: I mean, but still one. Yeah, you want to? My answer is obviously investment and regulation, the two probably. Yeah?
>> If I might go first, if you look at the investments and the startups, it's about the same as Europe as in the U.S. It's when they start growing when they say in Denmark, you become big but you have to go to Germany, to Sweden, to Estonia and you have to do so many different markets to become big in Europe whereas in the U.S. you have pretty much one market. So if you make it there you make it big quickly and you get venture capital because the market is 300 million so if you get venture capital that's the potential market.
So that's one answer to it. So the response would probably be we should have one real digital single market. We've been talking about that for a decade in Brussels and in Europe to have a real data sourcing market. We're not achieving it because even though we call it data sourcing in our proposal many have more fragmentation built into it. One example, so Skype was built here, started from -- startup folks from Estonia and Sweden and you would probably not have Skype type services being created in Europe in the future because the way that regulators look at these type of services.
Instead of saying they have 9 different functionalities and chat is just a tiny bit of them, to say it sort of looks like SMS and texting and the way we have been regulating these kind of services is regulate them with each Telecom's regulator in each different State. In Skype where the vast majority is free, they earn so little money because you have people not paying for Skype, they had to hire lawyers to deal with regulators in each EU single market so that will wipe out these kind of services. They'll only survive if they're bought by a big U.S. company which cross subsidizes.
>> I was just going to add I agree with all the comments so far. I think there's another element which is hard, I think, in this context to get your head around but, if you look at those unicorns, I think it's important they're not all the same. They're a very diverse group of entities, what they are doing, the service and/or product they're providing. I think that you can probably say that there's also another unifying piece, which is they understood the power of single network effects, and I think that I'm not going to argue that the dynamic around network effects in China is the same as in the U.S. I think they're very different.
But I do think that in addition to I think the other comments about a single market, regulatory environments, that doesn't really apply to China as we know, I do think it's how to get network effects. It's not something you teach in the classroom. It's not something you have an academic approach to about, but at the heart of the whole Internet transition is we get away from a very traditional two to 300 year model of manufacturing products, getting it out the door. Of course to have a very different model where not always the first to the market win. In fact, many of those unicorns are actually second, third to markets because they learn the lessons of their predecessors who did not succeed so I think there's an element of network effects we need to study also in addition to the regulatory environment risk taking that I think is very important.
>> I'm actually going to go back to your question of ethics. I've been looking quite a lot at the ethics of using fitness monitoring devices, particularly employers using those devices, and one of the problems is that the other people in the workplace or employers don't always consider if the fitness monitoring device suggests that someone is becoming ill is not going straight to the doctor, but is being looked at by your manager or someone else, do they have a duty of care to look after that person? Or can they just sack them because they realize they're about to have a heart attack that's going to cost them a lot of money? That's being a bit extreme but there are a lot of ethical questions around business models particularly using any kind of health data to do with insurance, to do with driving, to do with employment and I don't think that the rest of society and particularly employers are really thinking hard enough about that before they get the benefits and the employees get the benefits.
But they must have a policy about, what do they do if that fitness monitoring suggests that there needs to be some kind of intervention that's going to affect their ability to work?
>> CAROLINE GREER: Yep.
>> ERIKA MANN: Do we have a company here in the room who is practicing something like this, where information about these devices is practically company-wide shared for a certain maybe medical departments in the company or so? I never heard about this. It's an interesting case.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Or health services.
>> ERIKA MANN: Or health services which, an insurer, or from the insurance side maybe somebody who could add some flavor to it? Maybe earlier your observations, maybe you could...
>> I'm not going to talk about the employer who I've just been looking at it for but I can tell you about an earlier one that is quite well known in the health service in the U.K., and that was that people were monitoring mothers to see if they had HIV and it was well known that if a mother had HIV the way it was transmitted to a baby is by giving birth naturally, rather than having cesarean Section but the ethics was said at first that it wasn't fair to tell the mothers and get them upset about the fact that they've got HIV and they didn't realize.
And then people said: No, this is completely wrong. Our duty is to protect the child so you must say that, and give them at least the option to have the cesarean Section rather than a natural childbirth so that's I think an enormous ethical question, but that's one that's in the past and in the public domain.
>> ERIKA MANN: Good to know and certainly will become an issue particularly if you don't have duty of care provisions involved. Thank you so much for this example.
A new topic? Somebody wants to go back to one which is already raised? Please.
>> Yes. I'm Fabian from the Swedish Bitcoin Exchange company BTCX, and as an example of having a single digital market, we're currently trying to expand to different European countries, and it's like crazy, yeah, if not impossible, close enough.
And I'm thinking that we should also think about having the financial regulations more unified within the European Union, so that we can, like, expand to all of EU without having to pay this enormous fees for applying for the regulations in the different countries.
Also, as you mentioned earlier that the PayPal doesn't exist in different countries and that could be a problem for different kind of digital services. I think that that could be solved pretty easily with, like, bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies so exciting to know about bank systems and thinking more of the alternative ways of payments.
>> CAROLINE GREER: How do you deal with this as a company when clearly that's some sort of regulatory or policy impediments? You knew this from the outset so was there a bit of optimism hoping things would change or lobbying a Coalition of like minded companies? How do you confront this? Because you clearly have a good business model. You don't want to stop.
>> Yeah, I mean currently, we're looking for investors to help us to pay these fees and go with it as the system is now, but we're also trying to lobby for politicians to make a change. One of our Board members is also a member of the Parliament in the Swedish Government, so he's also working there to try to make a change to this regulatory madness.
>> ERIKA MANN: It's a tough issue. I lost 15 years in the European Parliament. I can tell you, it's very difficult, European regulation. Too broad, too general and often too far reaching and not looking at really creating this uniform market, but just -- it becomes each time more complicated. Each new regulation puts a burden on the already existing one but you can't get rid of the separation, because National states don't want to. So in reality, you add more complication.
But okay, there's always hope. There's always hope.
>> The question you raised the digital single market in Europe, we're midway through the Commission's review on how far we've come. That was a pretty I'm not going to say depressing, that's too far but it's not entirely encouraging report. What are we doing wrong? From Europe so let's get back to Europe. How can we creator stimulate a better environment? How can we become more like Europe or Asia? What can we do?
>> You should stop calling it a digital single market. If it's creating more National rules making it harder for a big innovative Swedish company to become bigger in the world. Maybe we should protect that tag line of digital single market. We see it in automation and e-Privacy rules that they have elements that are going against what they're trying to achieve. e-Privacy will be able to be considered to have encrypted services Internet encryption? It's not entirely clear. That's weird from a privacy proposal. Automation rules where we'll go from the you have one company selling to the rest of Europe because they're resident in one country. Now they have to register in each EU state. Same thing for online apps, Skype type services that's a lot more fragmentation. So we'll probably have fewer unicorns in the future thanks to the digital single market proposal.
>> And also with the current reform, that's also a big issue for the digital single market right now, and I mean as the State of it now, it looks like it's not even going to be better. Actually it's going to get worse in many issues. So that's also a great issue.
>> It will put more liabilities on platforms to monitor what's going on in the network and kind of censorship, prioritized censorship.
>> ERIKA MANN: Maybe for those who have less information about what is going on. You can find this all when you go to the website of the European Commission, you will find information. You'll go on to digital single market, and then you find many sublegislations. This is just a Framework to digital single market. It's a concept and it's actually a beautiful concept but then you have separate regulations and legislations below it and some of them are as problematic as described. Not all of them are so don't get us wrong here. It's not everything that's negative. There's some very good proposals but go and have a look at it and you can still get involved if you have an interest and many consultations still going on, legislations are going, to the vote in the House, most of them in the second half of the year in the European Parliament, when I say "House."
Go and get involved. Bring your examples there and talk about it. I think people need to hear.
Somebody else who has similar experience and would love to talk about it? No?
Okay. Any other topic burning? Please?
>> I'm from the Luxembourg Institute. Coming back to the face recognition, we saw it in the train station. If I build a roller coaster, I have somebody come to me and check if the design is good. Why not if I'm a company and creating some IT stuff? Why we don't create a framework or institution which will be recognized in European and have to track the work flow, the processes, the data the company get at and use before we said it's okay to use it? So maybe it could be an idea and it will maybe kill some ideas before they start, but it maybe could be a good idea to get more visibility to the people so they know okay if it has this sign on it it will be okay and have this, this, and this regulation in it.
>> ERIKA MANN: I have a personal view. I don't know if you want to hear it. It's not a bad approach. Typically the National data officers should do this. As a company, you should be able to go to them and say: Can we have an open chat with you? Now, there are some have big offices and they might give you educated advice. Some are smaller and might not have so much insight into company practices. Sometimes you want to be careful as well depending on your business model but the second one which I think is important, the trouble is they will respond to what exists. But if you want to do something totally new and fresh, you might get an answer you don't want to hear, because you still believe that your model is okay and it's justifiable.
So you have a kind of, you know, do you repeat what already exists in the market? Or are you ready to look into something new and fresh, which isn't there yet? It's a tough balance which you have to probably each time have to take but that's my personal opinion. I don't know.
You are in a new market segment, totally new.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Yeah.
>> ERIKA MANN: Relatively newish. So what is your answer to this?
>> CAROLINE GREER: I lost track. Repeat the question, be specific?
>> ERIKA MANN: The question was how about having new companies going to somebody who is well educated from an official entity like Government, which would be in the data environment, the data -- the National data agencies, an Officer. So is it a good idea? Would it help?
>> CAROLINE GREER: I don't know. It depends.
>> ERIKA MANN: Okay. Christian?
>> CHRISTIAN BORGGREEN: I've talked too much, sorry. But just quickly, all companies have to abide to privacy rules, contractual rules, consumer rules, what have you, right? So what I imagine happens if you start off with a great idea and you work and suddenly you realize we should check with the lawyer, you probably don't have three lawyers saying: Hey, we should start programming. Lawyers are not really good at that but if you had to have a startup, they have a great idea and then should they then sort of ask the authorities hey can you come by? They say we can go by October 27th at 8:00 in the morning, would that work for you? You can probably say no, we need an answer this week because they're our competitors from wherever have already provided this service so we should be a little bit careful with having too many obstacles to innovation.
>> We have an example in the U.K. where the kind of thing you're talking about is working, and that is in some of the incubators. They work with the financial conduct authority and the bank of England who tells them whether the idea that they've got in the incubator environment is one that's going to meet the current banking regulations. And since if you're going to be in that space, you have got to obey by those regulations. That seems to me an area where it makes sense, in sort of industry by industry perhaps rather than generally.
>> ERIKA MANN: Let's go back to the Swedish model first. It's practically a response. And then we go to Switzerland.
>> So since we're also in the fintech industry, we tried to do that as first, going to the financial inspector in our country, and basically the answer we got was just like: No, since you're handling Bitcoin, you're obviously criminals, so yeah. We had, like, a lot of fights with almost all of the Swedish banks that we wanted to have a bank account to be able to provide the service, and instead, we just had to, like, roll with it and just start a service either way.
And then after that, proved that, yeah, we're not criminals. Here you can see all the bookings and everything like that, so in some cases, I think you just have to take a chance and then prove that the model that you're providing is the right one.
>> ERIKA MANN: You have a mic, good.
>> I give just a positive story. In Switzerland over the last four years, we've been developing a platform or a series of meetings between security experts and the emerging Internet of Things industry, in particular, I've been working in a consulting group of security experts to advise our Department of Energy about the new smart meters which will be part of our new smart grid system.
And as many of you know, as these Internet of Things devices have been created, we have horror stories of baby monitors being hijacked and things like this. The business model in the past has been if you can avoid a cost, avoid it, and it means that many of these devices have been created without the ability to do remote updates, to have good security checks, and similar.
About four years ago, we started as a group of security experts to advise the Department of Energy in Switzerland on how we expect the providers of these devices in Switzerland to pay attention to security aspects, and for these reasons, we looked very carefully at the parallel models already being developed in Europe. I don't hesitate to stress that Switzerland is not a part of the EU but we benefit and participate at very many different levels with the European Union.
The leading manufacturer of these devices, Switzerland is part of the consulting group, they listened carefully to what we said. It turned out unbeknownst to us they were already actively participating in a pilot programme to certify their device with the French Internet of Things security testing agencies, and so even though we weren't actually part of this process I feel that first, that we have been urging this manufacturer to pay attention to these security aspects as they produce their device. And secondly, that this manufacturer as a part of being able to sell the devices in France was taking advantage of the securities testing provided by the French Government and which I hope will be a model that will be developed in Europe. They benefited from our input, they took us seriously and they were prepared when they went to the French testing agencies to have their model certified so I think it's a good example of how we in the Internet Community, we in the security community, can talk to each other, can look for cooperation to provide best practices and hopefully it means that our businesses will benefit because when they come to market they'll have a much more solid product and they will gain the trust of the end consumers because they'll be able to show that they have taken the care to have their products tested and certified.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Another question?
>> ERIKA MANN: Somebody, the gentleman with the blue jacket.
>> Thank you. Hi, everyone. I just wanted to piggyback on the comment of the last commenter, and about the need of involving other stakeholders in thinking about Product Development. Can everyone hear me?
I noticed in talking to the other people who are working on technology products in the startup community that there doesn't seem to be much interaction between different groups within companies. For example we talk about engineers, designers, professionals, et cetera, so I think there is already some domains that need to be bridged in order to enhance people's understanding of how to technology products may impact individuals. But more broadly than that, I think what also could be improved on is user research.
I think a lot of companies as they're starting out, they're very cash-strapped and they don't necessarily have the resources to think through how the products they're developing may impact individuals, and the user research data is done if it's done it's usually focused on trying to figure out is there a business model here, but it doesn't necessarily encapsulate the certain risks were we were just talking about in terms of privacy and otherwise that are important if you don't want to breach users trust. Making sure designing of products is done user centric is essential in this domain.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Privacy by design and human rights by design, those processes are merely second stage, so, yeah.
I wanted to pick on Gonzalo. I was just curious about how Wayra, for example, works. Do you pretty much leave these companies to innovate by themselves? Or do they seek mentorship from other Government departments or how does that incubator work?
>> Wayra is part of the Telefónica, and it's basically targeting startups. We launch beauty contests in all the countries where we have operations and in some others, as well, and basically we provide the startup with some little funding. But not also with that, also provide them with support from the Telefónica professionals which might help them to develop their business model with regard to regulation, marketing, so all the different abilities that you might have professionals of Telefónica are helping these little startups to run these business models.
And we're not leaving it there. We also have earlier programmes, so we're trying to help these entrepreneurs even before they are startup to try to define their business models and to, for example, present the proposals to the Wayra Academy. We also have some venture capital that are investing also on some more developed startups so that they can make the next space so we have a wide initiative to have this innovation environment and it also can be coupled with some other initiatives from Governments, so it's not a closed initiative.
We also have this initiative open to other companies that want to participate, as well, in helping these startups, so we have quite wide innovation approach to help companies not only where we have operations but in some other countries, as well.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Thank you.
>> I just wanted to -- you were asking about what is kind of the environment that the unicorns or whoever, I know there's been suggestions about certifications and I think we need to have a complete picture here. And I speak as a former Chief legal Advisor to NIST working on encryption. Let's be very clear, certifications if you want to talk about keeping incumbent players in place, certifications are probably one of the best things that inhibit innovation. They have a role. I think we are only at the beginning of understanding how those certifications can work.
I know you're aware of this, the moment you certify against a security standard that standard is irrelevantly unsecured anyway. I think we need to change the mind set of how we think about security, Risk Management. This is a work in progress. Everyone's learning how to do this.
So be careful about assuming going down the path of certifications is a way to do this. They have an appropriate role, but don't think they're going to be the solution for solving a lot of these kind of things. When I hear that one country's testing, what are they testing against? I hope they're testing against a global standard that allows everyone to compete on level playing fields.
I'll leave the thought at that. The challenge is making sure we are using Global Standards, global approaches, let's not create impediments to market entry. We're seeing in some countries particularly in Asia that's starting to happen a lot with innovative technology products, so we need to fit the certification piece into a bigger picture of about what we're trying to achieve.
>> CAROLINE GREER: Yes, very good point. I think we're getting to the end. Thomas, good luck in summarizing all this. Let's see what you have.
>> THOMAS GROB: Thanks, Caroline. I'll just join my two moderators up here on the stage and would like to ask you to give them a big hand because I thought they have done a great job this afternoon.
[ Applause ]
Now, about I have brought this upon myself by designing such an open session to kind of wrap up this very interesting discussion, which I must say I really much enjoyed, and I thought it was really great from the value of the statements that we've heard.
So I have identified three general topics on which we could give messages out from this session. The first one was touched upon in the very beginning and wasn't really contested so I think it's easy to deliver the message open source and permissionless innovation are central pillars for innovation on the Internet, just like that.
Do you agree? Or is anyone not fine with this first key message? I will take that as a yes.
Then I was thinking about putting the answers up here but it wasn't really discussed so I erased that, and the second key message will revolve around personal data. Here we've had statements that we need a different approach, that there is a trust problem, that remarketing of old customer data is not a new business model really, and that customers have to know what is happening with their data, so this key message on personal data would read something like this: There is a need for a different approach, as there is a trust problem.
We need to gain customer trust, and the way to do this is by letting customers opt in, and informing them what is actually happening to their data. Agreement on this point, as well? You're an easy audience. Thanks.
So third point: Why is innovation in the EU not happening? We've heard that there is fragmentation. I've heard Christian say, stop calling it a digital single market if it isn't. We've heard there is overregulation, that probably we need less regulation and not more regulation. And we've also heard that there is a need to understand network effects. This can't be taught in a classroom, and maybe Europe has not really understood how to actually put networks effect into business models.
So the third message going out of this session from my point of view and I of course like to say that coming from our speaking for a telco, is Europe is suffering from overregulation. We need less regulation and not more. We need to understand network effects. And I'm not sure how to phrase it with the digital single market and the fragmentation, so maybe we can leave that out. We just say: Europe is not happening because it's overregulated, and because we don't really understand the network effects. Any ideas on improving the third message? I'm not really sure if I got that correct here.
>> Maybe instead of network effect it's also about scale. If you have one single market you'd have one scale, you do one app, you do one success in Sweden and you're European. More than half a billion consumers already so it's about scale.
>> THOMAS GROB: Having a true single market will help building network effects, maybe?
>> What can you scale?
>> ERIKA MANN: Scale and network.
>> If your product is no good and people don't want to use it then you're not going to have scale, right?
>> THOMAS GROB: Obviously.
>> ERIKA MANN: If you bring the question forward as well, not just the answer then I wouldn't say innovation is not happening in Europe. But it can't be scaled to a global scale because I think innovation is happening a lot.
>> THOMAS GROB: Very good point, yes. Why is European innovation not reaching scale?
>> ERIKA MANN: Yes, scale, become global.
>> THOMAS GROB: Did I miss anything central? I mean, I know I missed the data ethics topic completely but I thought the discussion is just starting here, and it's really hard to already derive key messages, and we should maybe note that one down for a business innovation oriented workshop next year at EuroDIG. I'd love to have a data ethics discussion, that's for sure.
So let's call it a workshop. Thank you, everyone.
[ Applause ]
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.