Preliminary findings and proposals by Task Force 4 on Digital Transformation
A digital-led global recovery from COVID-19
- To promote innovation in developing economies, targeting better the mobilisation of its resources by supporting these economies to create a comprehensive, rights-based digital ecosystem with a clear roadmap and encourage robust public sector transformations to make the digital world inclusive and sustainable.
Impact and potential of digital transformation on healthcare services and systems
- Engaging G20 policymakers in a global discussion to harmonise rules for health data protection and develop a framework for their secondary use. Moreover, enhancing health data interoperability and transparency to strengthen international cooperation and the coordinated response to global threats such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Digital education/training to bridge the urban-rural divide, gender and age gap
- Committing G20 countries to overcome the hard and soft barriers to internet access, addressing the gender and cultural biases that limit the potential benefits of digital learning.
- Making educational materials available in documents, sizes, and formats easily and cheaply accessible through low-speed internet or offline and integrated with existing devices. At the same time, governments and telecommunication companies should subsidize data costs and devices to reduce their cost, making them more accessible. The use of digital and blended learning should be anchored to a sound pedagogical approach and supported by an improvement of the basic digital skills of all children.
- Prohibiting the monetization of children’s data.
Impact of new digital technologies and AI on employment and workplaces
- Reconceptualising existing regulatory tests to take into account the realities of platform work, based on its specific criteria, such as the role played by the platform “app”, the manner of control exercised through the app, and the power to set terms and conditions for service provision.
- Ensuring that home-based platform works for women to reduce the gaps in male and female labour force participation. Yet this will only happen if the regulatory agenda addresses women’s “time poverty” and makes sure that home-based platform work is visible and free from the biases that characterise the offline world
Cyber security risks, threats, and data privacy
- Promoting the cyber resilience of the global financial system through operational collaboration by developing common standards/expectations about coordinated responses and achieving agreement on prioritization and implementation rather than on deterrence.
- Encouraging social media platforms to sign up to a sharing and checking standard to encourage the production and dissemination of fact-checks.
- Creating a specific schools’ curriculum, which delineates the range and type of threats presented by web-based media, may help young people identify these threats and provide them with the tools to evaluate misinformation and potential deceit.
- Encouraging national authorities to re-design the “notice and consent” model to create better ways for people to have meaningful “agency” over their data. Monetization could be incorporated into such an arrangement by requiring firms to compensate users who allow their data to be used in surveys and other activities. “Official data,” such as name and date of birth, must receive official authentication, and this is to be the only legal source of this data.
Global governance framework for data flows and AI
- Establishing a Digital Stability Board (DSB) to create an updated and comprehensive international governance architecture for big data, artificial intelligence and the digital platforms. The DSB would be a multi-stakeholder forum to coordinate and shape global standards and policies across the platform economy, monitoring their implementation.
- Adopting an ethics-by-design methodology to drive the design, and deployment of trustworthy AI/digital ecosystems in each State. Their initiatives would be harmonized by a multi-dimensional AI governance framework that includes education, training, toolkits, methodologies and their adoption, governance models, ethics committees.
- Encouraging regulatory officials from APEC members and the EU Commission to intensify efforts to reach an agreement on the interoperability of their data privacy regimes to promote greater consensus around policies that will foster data free flows with trust across borders. Moreover, participants in the WTO JSI E-commerce initiative should aim to conclude the negotiations expeditiously and include “soft law” provisions.
Aims and tools of competition policy in the digital economy
- Promoting the adoption of a coordinated framework based on commonly accepted principles for the designation of digital gatekeepers or providers of core platforms. It would consist of a blacklist of practices declared undesirable, i.e. combining data from different sources, dual role for platforms as a core service and a competitor, and self-preferencing.
Private-public cooperation to strengthen digital infrastructures
- Endorsing an open-source public digital infrastructure to coordinate public-private cooperation in the digital economy and alternate innovative financing mechanism for digital inclusion projects as specialised Digital Inclusion Social Impact Bond.
Impact of digitalization on global value chains and services
- Creating a Sustainable Technology Board to coordinate, cooperate, and develop standards and guidelines on new technologies to facilitate their adoption. As such, the platform could be mandated to help shape technology in a way that advances SDG-oriented value chains through active policies that guide technology in these directions.
- Unlocking and scale up agricultural science and technology innovations through coordinated policy actions, as tax incentives on critical digital technologies, that maximize the progress towards improved farm productivity that respond to the new climate risks and challenges for social inclusion.
- Reaching a consensus on the online genetic data or digital sequence information (DSI) definition, establish an integrated DSI policy, and engage with the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) as a block.
