Summary of the 75th session of the Committee on the Digital Economy (CDEP)

November 29, 2017

The CSISAC has participated in the 75th Session of the Digital Economy Policy Committee (CDEP), held after the meetings of the Working Parties on Measurement and Analysis (MADE), Communications, Infrastructure and Services (CISP) and Security and Privacy (SPDE). The CSISAC delegation was formed by the Steering Committee member Đorđe Krivokapić from EDRi, and CSISAC member Claire Milne in the CISP and MADE meetings. The CSISAC wants to thank all the civil society experts that have taken part in the preparation of the meeting, contributing with analysis and suggestions of the OECD draft papers and discussions.

The work during this session was organised around the OECE Going Digital project, one of the six OECD Horizontal Projects involving 14 Committees and OECD bodies, with a expected outcome including 80 projects, 70 reports and 15 workshops. The CSISAC has reiterated the interest in continuing the engagement in this stream of work, taking the Civil Society Seoul Principles, and the Civil Society Statement of the Cancún Ministerial as a reference. At this stage, the work is focusing on access to data, both as a resource for other developments such as artificial intelligence, and as a driver of new forms of data governance in the future.

Among the most relevant questions, the CSISAC is happy to see the general agreement on the continued adequacy of the OECD Cryptography Guidelines. Despite some trends threatening the capacity of individuals and organisations to protect communications and personal information, the OECD Guidelines will continue be serving the needs of the policy-making community as it has been doing sincd 1997. The CSISAC will continue fostering encryption by default to secure personal communications, and to minimise the impact on citizens and consumers from system failures potentialy deriving into data breaches.

New topics include the start of work to evaluate the role of blockchain technology as part of the wider digitalisation project. The CSISAC is happy to see the OECD following our proposal to work on this topic, made in the context of the 2016 Ministerial on the Digital Economy in Cancún, and will be contributing to the ongoing work. Another new prominent new area of work is the analysis on the impact of digital platforms. The increasing role of platforms in the economic, social and political dimensions raises questions about their impact, and how to measure it, towards identifying recommendations to guide the design and implementation of connected. policies. The CSISAC will continue engaging in this work, which will involve the need of answering questions about the governance of this platforms in the context of existing governance structures in the territories where they operate.

Many other important topics have been part of this work, with useful opportunities for civil society participants to take part in the conversations, including the Internet of Things with the many aspects concerning privacy and security, ICT and the environment, the protection of children online, digital risks or cross-border e-commerce. The CSISAC calls the Civil Society participants with expertise on those topics to engage in the ongoing work. You can learn more in the CSISAC website, or directly contact the CSISAC Secretariat