Speech by the Minister of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, Maria van der Hoeven, at the opening of the World Conference on Information Technology 2010

Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure and an honour to welcome you today to Amsterdam, the national, creative and digital capital of the Netherlands. I am delighted to be speaking to such a diverse audience from so many countries and so many key economic sectors. And I am grateful to the Spanish EU presidency for adopting this 17th World Congress on Information Technology as an official event of the European Union. Before taking you on a digital trip to the future, I would like to tackle an issue we are facing today. Who owns the data on the Web?

Esmée Denters

Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you the story of Esmée Denters. At seventeen, she started posting video clips on YouTube. She sang cover versions of hits by famous artists, such as the American singer Justin Timberlake. Within a few months, her clips had been viewed over a hundred million times. The rest is history. She signed up with Timberlake, and at 21, she has become an international star in her own right.

Why am I telling you about her? Because Esmée shows us how ICT can spur creativity, stimulate innovation and open up new horizons. The Internet and ICT are causing a true paradigm shift – and this is just the beginning of the digital revolution. But are we making the most of it? I don’t think we are. Because both our business models and some of our legislation are outdated. It’s time to modernise them.

Look at intellectual property rights for instance. Should we have stopped Esmée from posting covers on YouTube? That is where we seem to be headed in Europe, where discussions primarily tend to focus on how to strengthen and uphold intellectual property rights. But are we right to cling to laws devised for the era of the printed press and the vinyl record? Shouldn’t companies be striving to develop new business models that are worth upholding? Shouldn’t governments let go of restrictions that have ceased to make sense in the Digital Age?

To come back to Esmée, I think governments should create an exception to current copyright legislation to allow for non-commercial “user-generated content” on the Internet. The European Commission is rightly looking at it, but hasn’t received much support as of yet. The consequence is that people posting clips and videos risk prosecution in more and more countries, while platforms like YouTube find themselves having to remove items whenever copyrighted content is used -- including Esmée’s!

Glimpse into the future

Ladies and gentlemen, we all have a decisive role to play in the next stages of the digital revolution. But what future do we envision? To give us food for thought, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs commissioned a study on the future of ICT. Four scenarios were distilled from dozens of interviews with experts around the world. They give us a glimpse of how ICT might impact on our economies and social life by 2020. You can read about them in the publication “ICT 2020” that you will receive later today.

Internet islands

In one scenario, the ongoing economic crisis leads to protectionism. The Internet is increasingly seen as lawless and chaotic, and in need of regulation. Governments set new rules and fight piracy effectively. The Great Firewall continues to censor domestic Internet searches, while the firewall of another Pacific power blocks all illegal content. The unintended side-effect is to stifle innovation. And the open source movement withers away.

Companies, nonetheless, manage to boost their profits by duplicating the success of Apple’s iPad. They close off their devices, applications and networks, and lock in their users in walled gardens. Regulators allow companies to pursue their vertical integration strategies, nervous about damaging the economy again. As a result, the Internet fragments into a collection of closed networks – separate Internet islands, centered around a commercial brand, a national entity or a shared interest. Each island is subject to regional laws and different social norms. Within those islands, innovation thrives. But between the islands, interaction is limited and expensive. Facebook users are charged a penalty for transferring their contacts to LinkedIn. Scientific breakthroughs are kept within the islands. By 2020, the Internet is no longer a single open space for global communication.

New frontiers

By contrast, the other scenario I want to mention is all about new frontiers, openness and connectedness. Shortly after the economic crisis has bottomed out, governments withdraw their large stimulus packages to make room for economic reform and new initiatives. After a period of unsteady growth, pockets of innovation emerge again. An open commons approach to the challenges of the 21st century prevails. Open software, open standards and open content provide an open platform for innovation, where individuals and companies interact to jointly develop innovative content and services. Consumers become co-creators. The idea is that to benefit from the digital commons, you need to contribute.

By 2020, innovation blossoms and creativity bubbles. Mobile technologies render large physical headquarters obsolete, as ICT has come to fully support global nomadism. Bit by bit, everything becomes integrated with everything else. In the open commons approach, both professional and social users are the owners of data and information on the Web, leading to groundbreaking new ideas and solutions. But the most revolutionary ideas come from countries such as Turkey and India, as Europe, Japan and China struggle to keep up because of their ageing populations.

Declaration of Amsterdam

Ladies and gentlemen, this is fiction, of course. But I hope these stories will inspire our discussions in the next three days. And lead us to endorse the Declaration of Amsterdam, spelling out how we want to use ICT to stimulate growth and reduce our carbon footprint, improve health care and make sure no one is left behind in the digital revolution.

The key question now is how to turn those ambitions into action. And that’s where we need support from all of you, from both the public and private sector. Because it is only by working together that we can unleash the power of ICT to inspire, innovate and transform – to recover from the worst recession in our lifetime and build a better, smarter and greener world. On day three, we will present tangible initiatives from numerous companies, organisations and countries that aim to do just that. Initiatives that will map out the road ahead from Amsterdam to the next WCIT in Montreal in 2012. I would like to thank WITSA and the European Commission for their active support.

The next speaker, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, will map out her vision of how ICT can help us recover, create jobs and remain competitive in the global economy. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not know what the future will bring. Is the Internet going to fulfill its promises of prosperity, freedom and democracy in an open, worldwide network? Or is it going to fragment into closed, controlled, strongly regulated communities? What we do know is that ICT drove fifty percent of Europe’s productivity growth in the past fifteen years. We simply cannot allow its potential to go to waste. Finally, what about the Esmées of this world? Are we going to let them in or lock them out? Their futures, the future of ICT and the future of our economies are in our hands. Thank you.