speaking and so welcome to this roundtable which i'm really really looking forward to because it's got a bunch of really really good panelists first the topic itself is really exciting digital basically shows that we're not enjoying a potential smooth sailing over the next few years already in two thousand and nineteen things were tense two thousand and twenty it became rough and need to be driven not only i guess from from a european perspective but also i guess this is a global perspective that that we're looking at but of course we're in euralo and so we've got three other panelists that will then be commenting on the american university she used to work with larry strickling at the us department of commerce so i guess she's quite aware of internet governance topics on a big scale richard multistakeholder governance scenarios that many people have pushed for and so he's going to offer i guess a very different view perhaps agree with some of the points that wolfgang has made in his echoed with some other governments in europe so lucien knows much about this i can't say that he's the guy that wrote the speech but he was close to where things were happening and i hope that you'll be able to share some insights also from not only a french perspective but a european perspective of course the big question here and this is that of this session is there a difference between europe and the rest of the world we called it europe everyone on the call and i hope that we'll get a lot of input from people around who are attending on this call you'll be able to ask questions or make comments in two different ways you can either write them on the chat  so if it's a question just put the question before that and then we'll go through the questions in the chat but you will also be able to intervene by using the wonderful capabilities of zoom and  you look somewhere in there there's a way for you to put your hand up and we'll take the questions then on the comments as as a cue that will appear on the screen hopefully technology will work right we've got so we have on the application layer now so many different voices and we see on the ground layer also a number of efforts to splinter the has a number of interesting elements and which is now summarized under the slogan of the european digital decade so never before europe had a comprehensive strategy looking ten years a to certain types of censorship or protectionism and things like that my understanding from the package which is now on the table  is really you know that europe becomes more active and becoming on its own a big player but based on rules and it's interesting to see what to you know stop innovation in the car industry in contrary so this has stimulated the development of the industry and has saved a lot of lives so the security level was higher and more or less first an article that you drafted that is quite a few pages and that touches on a lot of issues that was already hard to digest but i think the additional points that you have given to us right now because this is an ongoing activity there's so much that keeps on going is also a lot for for everyone to digest and i wonder how our panelists are digesting this we're going to now put them to the test i guess and see how they feel about states for an entire full year which by the way is the first time in the entire forty eight years of my life that i have not left the country my mother being from the uk we would always go back at least once a year so as olivier said i you know prior to my time american university i worked for the us government for about twenty years and while eight of those were with larry strickling which was awesome i worked across four administrations so i worked across the clinton bush obama and a couple years of the trump administr technology policy in the biden administration they've stacked up on cyber security in the sense of protecting and having resilient government networks and networks in the united states but you do not have the announcement of other  confirmed political appointees people that would go into larry's old job or be commissioners at the fcc or any of our other regulatory agencies so none of that's happened yet and in the economic pillar at state department which is where some of these issues were handled people have not been itself is very very split in terms of how to handle technology issues and it's one of the challenges that that we encountered in the trump administration as well both democrats and republicans are all concerned about technology policy issues but for very different reasons which means there's not a lot of harmony here in dc about how to actually address the issues of the day the one thing that i think that's clear from the  very interesting that the first international trip the secretary of state along with the secretary of defense took was to go out and meet with what they called the quad which is an alliance of us india japan  australia what this says to me is that clearly china is still top of mind in the biden administration i will say there's very little that unifies people here in washington dc concern about china is one of those things so regardless of political affiliation regardless of administration everyone here is concerned about china so that still continues to drive sort of not just foreign policy but all aspects of economic policy here in washington i predict what you'll see and what we're starting to see as  those i think they will implement them differently but they are maintaining some of the previous policies so i don't think folks should think that there's going to be a wholesale shift on some of these things i can definitely explain the policy of the us government  relationship is always important and us foreign policy aspects i will say it is complicated by the fact that the uk is no longer part of the european union that will add an interesting wrinkle in terms of how we washington looks across the atlantic for or that's not going to continue i think that every country or every regio n legislates values that's what governments do and while the us and europe have a set of shared values for the most part the prioritization of those values and the execution of those human rights value chain different rights you're definitely going to from that have different perspectives on what to do i think the other thing that's going to continue to be a challenge with the transatlantic relationship is the historical preferred meaning our colleagues in europe will look at a situation to give all the things that could happen both good and bad try to prescribe a series of rules around that and then let things happen here in the united states historically we look at an issue with see what happens if bad or weird things happen we then try to course correct after the fact i think both approaches have their merits and their drawbacks but i don't see that changing as a cultural norm so i definitely see some challenges in that space where there could be some expectations that the united states will go a certain way and i'm just not sure what's going to happen quite as fast and i think to wolfgang's point you know the world has changed in the four years of the trump administration and europe has become or at least i should united states has that look historically that'll be interesting to watch as well and the last thing i'll say i think one of the other challenges that's going to unfold for the transatlantic relationship is that the eu recently concluded an agreement with china i a threat that similar so maybe i'll close with that i'd like to look at the chat couldn't keep up but i can maybe try to answer some of the questions that were in the chat and maybe it's the comments on one i think between bill and richard the other thing that's different i think between the us regulatory system and the european regulatory system is that in the united states when we do decide to regulate congress will pass a law the implementation of that and the european approach has been different on this i do remember in my ntia days in several bilateral meetings with the european union the european ambassador to washington telling me oh you americans you're too as to what you said fiona one thing that i was surprised you didn't mention were the commercial tensions that one has seen for several years now surrounding namely the the g i wish him very very very well in terms of that approach tim's job as special assistant to the president means that he's a voice in an interagency process and the reality is that there are a lot of different parts of the us government that are involved in today's tech policy from all the different cabinet agencies yeah and so you know it's going to be one of many and so it's hard to say right now and please see how the rest of that table fills out right now you have t wu announced his special system to the president on technology and competition presumably he's gonna play in the antitrust area but you don't know who's gonna take other jobs in the office of science technology policy in the white house you don't know who is going to be the intellectual property enforcement coordinator inside the white house you don't know who on the national security staff is going to deal with technology policy you don't know who's taking any of the jobs at the commerce department for mta the patent and trademark office department on technology policy either and all of those voices have a say in what the administration actually does there's never a single person that actually you know definitively makes a decision  season to find out about all these exciting things in the meantime we're going to have next richard hill to comment on i guess both what fiona has shared with us and wolfgang has richard is known to have different views and i hope that he'll be able to share these with us richard welcome thank you but i'm gonna disappoint you because actually i agree with much not everything but much of what  y but also equity and resilience now covid is a great example global supply chains were extremely efficient but they had no resilience when covid hit so i think we've now seen especially with covid there is a role for governments and the question is what is the proper role for governments and how can you prevent them from doing stupid things which they do a lot of including during the covid so what's this got to do with wolfgang well i'm just gonna quote him because wolfgang i really think you've hit the nail on the head with this one this is in his paper if there are conflicts between the general public interest and private profit interests it needs the stronger involvement of parliament's to discuss and find balanced solutions absolutely correct as olivier said i and some of my colleagues in particular have been considered weirdo outliers but actually we were just saying this a long time ago and so i would say wolfgang and others welcome to the club by the way i have some links to references i'll post something in the chat later if people want to look up some links wolfgang also says to delegate responsibilities for managing hate speech and fake news to private companies is not a sustainable solution absolutely couldn't agree more and it's also important to stress the disastrous effects of the internet on conventional media and democracy again i'll put a link but you know it's cambridge analytica and that kind of stuff and again wolfgang says another open and critical issue where private and public interest because collide is the future of digital currencies i won't go into that here but that's absolutely true i fully agree with wolfgang's analysis of the different national approaches which he outlined before it absolutely brilliant and i mostly agree but not one hundred percent when of wolfgang says that in cyberspace europe wants to be a norm maker and not a norm taker yeah i don't think they're gonna agree wolfgang i think it's a pipe dream because up to now they've always basically kowtowed to the us but let's see what happens when i judge a politician i look at what they do not at what they say the new transatlantic relationship based on common values yes i think that everything should be based on common interests if you can find common interests and then you can move forward now the issue with china is that we actually don't have common interests notably with respect to free speech but also on how the government runs the markets and so on wolfgang covered that very well the commonality of interest between europe and the us as fiona pointed out eeah okay in the postwar period of course it was very strong because of the huge differences with respect to fascism and communism so there was a natural alliance but actually they're quite different values with respect to free speech the role of governments the welfare state but you know we should never forget that the us is violating everybody's right to privacy not just through you know the google and so on but actually the government in the guise of fighting terrorism fully agree with wolfgang's analysis of except that having spent quite a lot of time in the itu i'm quite confident and i'm sure fiona would agree with this nothing's likely to happen in the itu because they'll never agree on anything and one or more states can actually prevent things from going forward the more realistic threat if any is that huawei will just do its own thing and it would be adopted de facto and there are good examples of that for those of us who are old timers you remember that in the beginning the dominant routing protocol on the internet was actually  proprietary protocol which then later got adopted by everybody else and standardized so a dominant provider can actually impose their own standards the large digital platforms will become the subject of stronger regulation says w i think that's german in german that's something that you wish for or at least some people wish for but it's not necessarily an if that is it's not necessarily something that will happen and wolfgang mentions the wto and other trade related negotiations actually if you look at the proposals you can see them for example in the tpp but they're the same ones they're not public in the wto but they're bandied around and they tend to leak the point of those agreements is actually to enshrine the status quo and so to make sure that we will not be able to have greater government intervention and stronger regulation that's the purpose of these trade agreements so we have to really watch out for that and i fully agree that we need a multistakeholder approach i would the multi stakeholder approach introduced in wsis in two thousand and five is and remains the golden path well actually multistakeholder has been around for a long time before that it works fairly well in win win situations it doesn't work in other situations exactly clear what that is the moratorium probably made sense back then a lot of developing countries and economists don't think it makes any sense now of course those who gained from it do think it makes sense and so that's a big battle going on right now in  free flow of data they want free flow of data within the limits of the gdpr according to von der leyen china's a systemic rival well you know rival is whoever you want it to be as far as i know china is not very keen to export their social economic system unlike the old communist bloc which was those of us who live in the cold war know that but china is no longer marxist or communist in that sense they're just doing their own thing whereas we're still trying to export our values right  around telling the world you have to do this you have to do that fiona i'm sure you noticed that biden reinforced us policy on lgbt rights and so the us is not going to go around and tell everybody in the world hey you have to really recognize  discussed that very well i won't comment on that and how is biden going to handle digital trade with china tthat's already pretty clear as fiona said it's same as trump in substance but of course in a softer form so we're going to see the iron hand in the velvet is basically going to go back to the clinton obama policies which basically the big tech agenda and just since i've gone over time i'm going to no actually yeah i have gone over time so i'm going to stop otherwise i'll come back to killer robots because i do want to say something about that but only if time allows thanks richard if you want i mean if it's quick you can still add okay so i'll add just real quick on the killer robots that's something i saw quite a bit about because i know a bit about military technology governance more inclusive and well i quite agree with wolfgang first on saying that it's mostly everybody against everybody or should we say europe towards an  excellent discussions going on there as well so i think taking questions i see most of the people who have written in the chat are also putting their hands up so we'll go over to the queue but first wolfgang kleinwchter you've heard quite a few english in spanish in french or in russian i thought i'd mentioned this because sometimes people on the language channels don't know that the interpretation the magic of interpretation goes both ways so that you can also intervene there policies and right now we see that european union and germany in particular already also using this concept of digital sovereignity what is your position on that on like using this term how do you maybe decision maker in terms of how things worked so like china or russia you know countries that have that perspective it seems to me that european countries have adopted the term and tried to interpret it differently to say no it's not about the nation state being the decision maker it's about the individual citizens and it's about human rights being at the core of the internet so this is much more about the european value system and saying that's actually the core of the internet the united states has not adopted the term d sovereignty and i don't ever think it would but again i think that's the difference between the us and europe in terms of i think richard actually said that well which was you know allowing me to paraphrase and get exactly what he said wrong but sort of allowing free flow within the confines of what that igf speech you're talking about from the french president that lucien was involved in writing was very much you know the california internet the european internet the chinese internet and maybe that is sort of how i would use the term digital sovereignty but it definitely has been  co opted by colleagues in europe to mean putting human rights at the core and that is  twitter a couple of days ago it was slow down technically but also i should say that we have some news from russia i'll do it very generic yes we are going to be it's not it's it's technically is the single internet but internally it's mostly focused investments focused on local people and the local platforms and the local not to the people not the human internet which we're talking about right now so the next big step will be in the in the machinery and the manufacturing in the digital world  stuck in about the mostly of the for the machine data thank you very much thank you very much andrey i keep on thinking you're not a machine but very much involved in lot of work ahead i was thinking of starting with the internet and further than that a little concern of the time but we've still i'm told that we will have an extension so next in the queue is were not this active back then so it's great to see sixty five people in a room having interesting discussions things have shaped up pretty nicely which is great i just wanted to go back to raising for global not just business but all kinds of things including cooperation and covid and so on if the european model is replicated around the world perspective slash recent developments in cyberspace no day passes where we hear in the news about major cyber attacks and my question would be what do  it's cyber it's covered by real world already interesting thank you i'm not seeing any other panelists wishing to add to this let's go to the last person in the  wall and we don't actually want the wall right we'd like to have a solution where we don't need a wall and unfortunately if you look at the internet we do have a wall with china the great wall of china and the us is trying to reinforce that wall by trying to ban tiktok various other strange things that i think are strange some people might think they're perfectly reasonable now that was trump and we don't know what biden's going to do so let's hope for the best but i agree with you wolfgang we need to recognize cultural diversity things take time we'd all like to live  democratic world which i think should look like switzerland that's not going to happen in my life but maybe in some future world there may be something even better than switzerland because switzerland is not perfect either we also do lots of strange things now for those who don't know the history  reflects the values of the side that won world war two and russia also was one of the winners of world war two let's not forget that and that's reflected in the social and economic rights whereas the free speech and so on that we always talk the democracy and so on in the west we always put forward that treaty and we don't talk too much about the other one but the other one is always there and this all came actually from thinking from roosevelt and he recognized fo rights one of which was freedom from hunger right freedom of speech freedom of religion freedom from fear that is security and freedom from hunger so roosevelt actually was a social democrat right even say a socialist recognizing that they're economic rights and you can't just let people starve because that's good for the profits of ford motor company or google you know take your pick whoever you want and by the way that's what was with pandemics for those who are following the vaccination why are we not vaccinating fast enough because the drug companies have the patents and they're not allowing other places like india to produce at a reasonable price richard you have another hour because i think this is taking us to another we're going too far but i just want to say this is a very tricky issue and we should converge on human rights we did after world war two but now we're diverging again i fully agree with wolfgang we've got to try to bring this together it's hard but we have to do that fiona closing words from the other side i wouldn't say of the lake it's actually the other side of the pond the big pond can you hear me so i think maybe it's been a very interesting conversation for the last couple of hours i very much enjoyed it and the only thing that it confirm's for me is you have to keep having conversations like this to talk things through history of what we saw and experienced but different takeaways from it and in terms of the us china dynamic you know it's just going to continue and i think my prediction of what comes out of the conversation in alaska which is where they're meeting i guess later this week is a commitment to keep talking i don't think the administration will not want to look weak on china here domestically and they'll still want to evaluate what are the best approaches i don't think that the ban on tiktok made sense either there were a fair number of things  while the policy made sense i think the execution was super flawed and so i think you'll see a softer ethic as wolfgang said an iron hand in the velvet glove approach but i don't see that changing but just continuing to talk with china i think is what will would say that the question a strategy which is no believes that not much has changed over the last twenty years but the topics have become higher profile and i think this will be interesting point okay i'm so sorry to interrupt this is michelle from staff our interpreters are having a hard time interpreting your line there's an you move closer to your microphone or yeah obviously very so much being said here we just have to say thank you have a very good morning afternoon evening or night wherever you are and thanks to our panelists and to everyone who's been on today's call and especially to the interpreters as