On the 1st of December, RIA Executive Director, Alison Gillwald presented at the Measuring Digital Inclusion session of the International Telecommunication Union’s 17th Annual World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium (WTIS).
Dr Gillwald talked about the lack of accurate evidence of digital inequality that COVID-19 has so starkly brought attention to. She called for global resources to be allocated to global public goods such as national digital statistics. She also called for a percentage of global digital tax to go to developing countries to help collect new digital indicators to measure digital inequality.
Overall, Gillwald argued that we need global co-operation to realise global public goods at national level. The governance challenges of limiting harms and mitigating risks associated with the increasingly complex globalised economy, requires dynamic and adaptive responses to the tendency towards market concentration, rights violations, as well as political and commercial surveillance and control–all which are are compounding digital inequality, she said. Download Dr. Gillwald’s presentation below.
