2022 Edition – Reflections

María González Gordon, Partner and Head of the Industrial Property, Intellectual Property and Digital Business, CMS Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th century, written in 1863, was not published until 1994 because Verne considered its tone to be excessively pessimistic. It is the story of a man who lives in…

Anna Borgström, CEO NetClean The internet is rapidly becoming the predominant gateway to information but also a hub for many illegal activities. When traditional offline crimes become cybercrime, they increase in scale with the use of computers and networks, reaching and affecting far more people than previously possible. One crime…

Caroline Logan Manager, CollaborateUp In early 2020 dozens of 5G towers were set on fire throughout Europe.1 The cause? False information spread online claiming that the millimeter wave spectrum used by 5G technology causes COVID-19. The falsehoods were backed with the fact that Wuhan had installed 5G towers before the…

Emma Burnett, Partner and UK Head of Technology and Data Protection CMS As a member of Generation X, I moved fairly seamlessly from analog to online, perhaps not noticing how quickly and completely day-to-day tasks were transformed. The next generations, as we all know, have emerged as digital natives and…

Interview with Melisa Basol Over recent years, online misinformation has grown exponentially, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, to become a real threat to public trust in what is available online. Some innovative solutions to the so-called “Infodemic” have been suggested or tried. The Mobile Century (TMC) spoke to Melisa-Silem Basol,…

Madeleine Hillyer, US Media Relations Specialist World Economic Forum Isabelle Mauro, Head Digital Communications Industry World Economic Forum Just under 30 years ago, the internet became public.1 Since then, we’ve seen most aspects of our lives move online. As internet use expanded throughout the 1990s and in the early 2000s…

Laina Raveendran Greene, CEO and Founder of Angels of Impact It has been more than 30 years since I first started in the telecommunications industry. As an idealistic young girl in 1986, who came from a science education, later studied law and had just left Singapore to study in Geneva…

Masooma Khawari, Former Minister of Communications and IT, Afghanistan Information Technology is a rapidly evolving industry that plays a significant role in national development. Although there are many highly skilled women in the IT field, there is still a considerable gender gap in the leadership of the sector. This is…

Michele Merrell, Member of the Board and North American President GTWN and Member of the Board, Cable Bahamas and Aliv The worldwide Digital Divide in society must end. We must implement an inclusive, digital ecosystem for all in the digital economy. If there is any lesson we have learned from…

Dr Heather Hudson Professor Emerita, University of San Francisco, and Affiliate Professor and Former Director, Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Alaska Anchorage I have been engaged with efforts to bridge what we have come to call the “digital divide” for most of my professional life. At…

Claire Sibthorpe, Head of Digital Inclusion, M4D, GSMA There has been significant growth in connectivity, with more people digitally included than ever before. Mobile continues to be the primary and, in some cases only, way most people access the Internet, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Six years ago, about…

Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for the Social and Human Sciences, UNESCO New technologies are at the cutting edge of transforming the world and the way we live. Maximising the positive impact of AI technologies is high on the international agenda.1 Today, artificial intelligence plays a role in billions of people’s…

Anne Bouverot, Former Director General of GSMA, Chairperson of Technicolor, Co-Founder of Fondation Abeona “Championing Responsible AI” Nowadays we hear “AI”, Artificial Intelligence, mentioned in all sorts of ways, in various contexts, sometimes as science fiction, sometimes as a potential solution for health or education problems, sometimes as “big tech…