Open Internet, Force Is….
Digital Communications Revolution
The importance of a revolution in digital and communications technology has risen in importance since 2011. Interestingly, the most significant proportion of respondents came from Latin America, who particularly emphasised explosions in social media and mobile phones. Respondents from this region had a particularly higher focus on this issue when compared with those from Europe and Asia.
Keeping the digital revolution on track.
A top trend that emerged from the 2012 World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Survey (which received almost 1,000 responses from the world’s leading thinkers) was the “digital and communications revolution.” But who laid the conditions for this revolution? And how are we going to continue to reap the benefits from this new era?
The answer may surprise you. The people who established the standards and rules allowing 99% of the computer servers worldwide to speak to each other, freely and openly, were not in the US government, Google, or even the UN. Rather, they belonged to civil society – academics and technologists – such as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Tim Berners-Lee, the participant in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics who few people recognized.
Let’s recap that revolution. Over the past five years, 21% of GDP growth in mature economies came from the open Internet. Growth will spread east and south as broadband connections via mobile in emerging economies smash through developed world’s subscriptions in 2013, as reported in the World Economic ForumGlobal Information Technology Report 2012. If the members of Facebook were part of a single sovereign state, it would be the third-largest country in the world; and its terms of service is looking more like a constitution determining people’s rights than an ignored contract with a service provider.
