Internet

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2020 examines trends and analyses emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. Through comparative evidence, it informs policy makers of regulatory practices and policy options to help maximise the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.
This third edition of the OECD Digital Economy Outlook provides a holistic overview of converging trends, policy developments and data on both the supply and demand sides of the digital economy. It illustrates how the digital transformation is affecting economies and societies. Finally, it provides a special focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying opportunities and challenges from the digital transformation.

The fifth generation of mobile network technologies, known as “5G,” promises greater speed, security, and capacity. 5G will underpin the internet economy and provide the backbone for the next generation of digital technologies. So, it is unsurprising that there is intense competition among companies and countries for 5G leadership. 5G will determine the direction the internet will take and where nations will face new risks and vulnerabilities. Who makes 5G technologies will affect security and innovation in an increasingly competitive technological environment. Decisions made today about 5G will affect national security and economic performance for decades to come. This is a competition among companies and groups of companies but also a competition between market-based and state-directed decisionmaking. The United States has relied on the former, China on the latter, and Europe falls somewhere in between. American technology remains essential for 5G mobile telecommunications. American companies have been strong performers in developing 5G technologies, but the United States and its allies face a fundamental challenge from China. The focus of competition is over 5G’s intellectual property, standards, and patents. Huawei, for example, has research programs to develop alternatives to American suppliers, and U.S. trade restrictions have accelerated China’s efforts to develop its own 5G industry. While American companies lead in making essential 5G technologies, there are no longer any U.S. manufacturers of core telecommunications network equipment.

The world is embracing a truly digital future. Upwards of one billion new users and 20 billion devices are forecast to be online within five years. However, for this future to deliver its promise of greater digital freedom, security, trustworthiness and accessibility for all, governance of the Internet across all its dimensions must be an obvious priority around the world.
In only a few decades, the Internet has grown to be a truly transformative phenomenon, with the capacity to touch nearly every aspect of life. The Internet now connects almost half of the world’s population and connectivity rates continue to expand apace, empowering users for both good and ill. The Internet is unquestionably the most powerful information system the world has yet seen, but the digital world is only just past its infancy. As the digital world evolves, the Internet is poised to be the superstructure underlying all other infrastructures.
The Internet has become such a part of our lives that we take it, and our access to it, for granted. Maintaining and preserving its open and accessible qualities — the very qualities that encourage creativity and connectivity — present a challenge. It is vital that the rules and safeguards of Internet governance keep up with the pace of digital innovation, particularly in the sphere of the IoT. At the same time, the process of governance must not inadvertently slow down the spread of the Internet’s benefits, reduce creativity or inhibit its global reach.

A thriving and open Internet provides the foundation for the fourth industrial revolution. There has been growing concern that the Internet may be in danger of splintering into a series of bordered cyberspace segments endangering its very nature. World Economic Forum’s Global Challenge on the Future of the Internet supported research highlights a number of fault lines that need to be addressed by bringing all stakeholders together.

The Internet of Things—sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value.

Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability.

To get a broader view of the IoT’s potential benefits and challenges across the global economy, we analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. Our bottom-up analysis for the applications we size estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy.

Project 2020 is an initiative of the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA). Its aim is to anticipate the future of cybercrime, enabling governments, businesses and citizens to prepare themselves for the challenges and opportunities of the coming decade. It comprises a range of activities, including common threat reporting, scenario exercises, policy guidance and capacity building.

The scenarios in this document are not predictions of a single future. Rather, they are descriptions of a possible future, which focuses on the impact of cybercrime from the perspectives of an ordinary Internet user, a manufacturer, a communications service provider and a government. The events and developments described are designed to be plausible in some parts of the world, as opposed to inevitable in all. They take their inspiration from analysis of the current threat landscape, the expert opinion of ICSPA members and extensive horizon scanning, particularly of emerging technologies.

Through a combination of stable technology, dedicated technicians and, resistance to random outages, the Internet has been resilient to attacks on a day-to-day basis, creating an extended period of prosperity. Yet, as we approach nearly absolute dependence on the Internet, cyber attacks of the future can and will affect globally interconnected systems like electrical grids and worldwide logistics systems. This Internet of tomorrow will be a source of global shocks for which risk managers, corporate executives, board directors, and government officials are not prepared.

The world is moving rapidly towards ubiquitous connectivity that will further change how and where people associate, gather and share information, and consume media. A canvassing of 2,558 experts and technology builders about where we will stand by the year 2025 finds striking patterns in their predictions. The invited respondents were identified in previous research about the future of the Internet, from those identified by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, and solicited through major technology-oriented listservs. They registered their answers online between November 25, 2013 and January 13, 2014.

In their responses, these experts foresee an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives “like electricity.” They predict mobile, wearable, and embedded computing will be tied together in the Internet of Things, allowing people and their surroundings to tap into artificial intelligence-enhanced cloud-based information storage and sharing. As Dan Lynch, founder of Interop and former director of computing facilities at SRI International, wrote, “The most useful impact is the ability to connect people. From that, everything flows.”