USCIB, Business at OECD (BIAC), and the OECD held another successful Digital Economy conference on May 25, which focused on a decade of OECD’s Internet Policy Principles (IPPs) and aptly titled “Policymaking in a Data-Driven World.” Distinguished speakers from the OECD and both the public and private sectors provided insights and expertise during the event: AT&T, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, IBM Ireland, Walmart, the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, MIT, Georgetown University and others.

The IPPs, adopted in 2011, have underpinned the OECD’s evolving work on digital economy issues. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has required many to conduct their lives primarily digitally, highlighted the salience of the IPPs, with its calls for global free flow of information and services, multistakeholder participation in policymaking, and consistent and effective privacy protections and cooperation to ensure Internet security.

“History will likely show that the IPPs were one of the OECD’s more noteworthy contributions to policymaking in a digital economy world,” said USCIB President and CEO Peter Robinson during his opening remarks.

Moreover, these themes have been echoed in recent digital economy work of the United Nations, the U.N. Internet Governance Forum and other multilateral bodies. The virtual conference also considered how the IPPs have been reflected in some of the OECD’s ground-breaking digital work – such as development of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Principles and how IPPs may be employed to address challenges posed by the rapid pace of digital innovation and related changes to the digital ecosystem.

“Over this past year with the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed an incredible acceleration of the digital transformation which has made our cooperation with the OECD all the more important,” said BIAC Executive Director Hanni Rosenbaum. “We see this third phase of the digital project as a key opportunity to advance, among others, secure and globally interoperable policy frameworks for responsible data sharing and collaboration on cross-border data flows with trust.

The conference was the fifth Digital Economy conference organized by USCIB, BIAC and OECD, and the second conference in the series that has commemorated the late Joseph H. Alhadeff.