The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> BATOOL ALMARZOUQ: Hello. Okay, apologies for the delay. Do the people online just hear me fine? No. Can you hear me just fine? Oh. Can't hear me. You can hear me, okay. So, is my speech to do with the channel ‑‑ can I check with people online? Can they just hear me fine? Okay. Hello. Okay.
Apologies for the delay, and thank you so much really for joining at this very early hour. And if it is your (?) thank you so much for coming all the way to Saudi. For people who joined in online, thank you for making the time to join. I want to acknowledge that this session is organized not just by me, you can just see me here in the room, but it's organized by four people, so it's organized by the wonderful Anne Steele, Abdulateef Salwan and Ghaida, who is our online moderator.
This is not going to be a panel. It's not similar to the other sessions that you've probably been to in the conference so far. So, the plan. I will be speaking in 25 minutes, at the very beginning, to give some introduction and speak a bit more about the topic. Then, we're going to move into table discussion for about ten minutes. So, people who are in the room, I'm going to gather you in groups, probably, and we've got networks and people who are online, you will have a Google Doc to use to share your reflections and I have some questions that I will be presenting.
Again, this is the last day of the conference, so we want everyone to connect, make a friend, network with the people next to you. And the last thing also that I want to say is that this talk is a bit heavy with legal concepts. I'm going to try to simplify, but also want to make sure ‑‑ is this on? It's not good. Okay. So, okay. Okay. Hopeful, the sound now is very better.
So, as I said, the talk is going to be a bit heavy with legal concept, but I'm going to try to make it very clear. I'm not a lawyer. None of us are lawyers. So, information or data shared during the talk is cited. The slides are also going to be available today online, so please go back to this information and all of this citation.
I'm a computational biologist by training and I'm an advocate. I am Saudi, but I'm based in the UK, and I'm currently working at the Alan Turing institute, which is the UK National Institute for Data Science and AI. And I come from an academic point of view to this topic. So, what I'll be trying to do is encouraging or trying to reflect and question about how we encourage growth innovation in tech without harm, what decolonization actually looks like for the Global South, and my intention is not to really focus on the legal concept or technical one, but more about the implication and what it means for us.
Okay, so, the first question: Why bother, actually, with the Internet monopoly? Why are we speaking about this in the first place? We are all aware of the disparity between the Global South and the Global North when it comes to resources, wealth, domination, extractions. To get more sense of what monopoly looks like, let's start with this, according to Oxfam. The top 1% owns actually 43% of all the global financial assets, while two corporations actually control 40% of the global seed market itself. This is how serious it is.
Looking at other stats within the tech itself. Again, all the figures I'm going to be presenting about the big tech are calculated in 2021 and cited with the citation here, but some might have it changed, but on don't expect these changes to be huge or very far from these figures.
So, we'll start with Apple. Net worth exceeds GDP many countries like Italy, Brazil, Canada, Russia. In fact, there are only seven countries in the world with higher GDP than Apple, into the trillions, meaning that these tech giants are richer than a lot of the world's population or nations. If Apple was actually a country, it might take the place of the eighth richest country in the world. That's how serious it is.
Let's look at another example, Microsoft. Microsoft is not different. It is $1.8 trillion market cap, which is really the third highest or largest company on our list, and it makes GDP on par with Canada and even richer than many developed economies, like Australia, Spain, Indonesia. Actually, if you take Apple and Microsoft and combine them higher, the GDP will be higher than Central Europe put together.
Again, Amazon is without doubt also one of the big tech giants worldwide and has seen very, very growth in their sales during the COVID‑19, and the market capitalization is $1.6 trillion, which makes that company also one of the richest of the 90% of the countries within the globe, and you can see it also in this map.
Again, last example, Facebook. It is not in the top ten with the highest value, but also has a market cap of $763 billion, and it is a very, very huge global player in the world stage. If Facebook were a country, it would be wealthier than Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway combined. That's how huge it is, in terms of GDP.
So, I think the question, the reason why I'm showing these sort of stats, in the past, there was this dynamic and chaotic way with start‑ups. So, people started a start‑up, they rose to the big, they become a household name within just a few years. Only ‑‑ sorry, I was moving this ‑‑ so, there was a dynamic and chaotic way of start‑up. They rose to the big, becoming household names within just a few years, and then they disappeared just as they reached the big, and that was a very, very normal cycle.
However, this cycle was interrupted when the new giant did not just get big, they stayed big, and then they got bigger and bigger and bigger. So, that's what the interruption is happening, and that's what we're trying to understand.
So, probably the question is, how did this big tech become big and they stayed big without going through the same cycle? And I think this is a very, very, very tricky question. I'm sure some of you in the audience have different answers. There is no very clear answer, so I'm going to be mainly really focusing on using some analysis presented by Cory Doctorow in his latest book "Internet Con," but this is something open for debate. And I just want to highlight a few things about this big tech company. Again, when I speak about them, this is not to criticize anyone who is affiliated with these companies; it's just more about to try to reflect about a lot of these practices, how we can sort of understand its implication into our society.
So, okay. So, one of the things that is really huge that big tech is doing, the big five tech companies made hundreds and hundreds of acquisitions. We don't have the exact number. Some say it is over 600 from 2010 to 2019. There were not that tiny versions. Each was worth over $1 million. And that shows how aggressively they were buying up other companies.
When they sell these ‑‑ when these people comes and buys these companies, founders of the starters has to sign an agreement. We call this agreement non‑compete clause, and these agreements prevent them from creating competing projects. So, effectively, they sort of try to stop this start‑up from ‑‑ or these innovators from starting a new rival company, and that kept talent and idea locked within the big tech companies. And many of these acquired companies were start‑ups, so like under 5 years old. And that suggests that this big tech was buying potential competitors before they could grow, and that pattern of eliminating this competition early before it becomes serious is one of these factors that actually contributed for these big techs staying big.
For example, we all remember Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp back in 2012, when Instagram was becoming very, very super popular, especially because they figured out how to make their social media work great on the phone, something that Facebook was a bit struggling with. So, rather than Facebook trying to fix that problem, Facebook actually bought Instagram for $1 billion. And at that time, people thought that was crazy money for an app that has no income, but Facebook knew what they were doing at that time.
Then, in 2014, they also saw WhatsApp becoming huge, huge in messaging, so they went even bigger, spending, I believe, $20 billion to buy WhatsApp. So, Facebook's own internal documentation showed that they were worried about people actually leaving their platform, and they knew it was very, very hard for users to switch because all of their friends, their network were already in Facebook.
So, fast‑forward to today. This strategy has worked incredibly, incredibly well for Facebook, and now Meta. We call Facebook Meta. So, they control the social media for about 4 billion people worldwide, and that makes Meta basically an official ruler for half of the world's sort of digital social life.
So, I think what I'm trying to say, instead of winning by making things better project, they went by buying up anyone who might have a compete with them. And because regulators, I mean, antitrust enforcement, which I'm going to speak about in a bit, did not stop this, Facebook has been able to keep doing this, leaving users with fewer choices and less innovation in social media.
The other factors that actually contributed to big tech staying big or becoming giant in the first place is the death of antitrust enforcement. And I'm going to be focusing more about some of these in the American economy. Back in 1890, laws were created, we called them the Sherman Act, to prevent any company from getting too, too powerful. And the thinking was pretty straightforward. Just like you don't want one person having too much political power, you don't want also one company controlling too much of the markets. So, this is something that, within the American system and legal system, they have thought about it from the very, very beginning, since the 1980s.
But everything changed in the 1970s, when a guy named Robert Bork came along with a new idea. He basically said monopolies were fine, as long as they did not raise prices for consumers. And this was a huge, huge change from the original law which was meant to stop any company from getting too, too big. And the idea caught fire at the University of Chicago back then, when economists created these fancy sort of models to prove that monopolies were actually good for everyone, and this model was so, so complicated that only the creator could understand them, which was perfect for big companies who would hire these same economists as consultants to justify these mergers.
Things really took off in the 1980s, and the U.S. Government basically stopped enforcing these antitrust laws. And I think it spread globally through leaders like Margaret Thatcher in the UK. And the results that we see today, we see monopolies everywhere, from airlines, from eyeglasses to candy companies. So, in tech, this is why Facebook could actually just buy Instagram and WhatsApp, instead of competing with them.
For example, it took 69 years for constant effort to break up the monopoly AT&T. People in the United States remember it. But today, similar monopolies face practically no threat of being broken up. They don't even have to prove they're not monopolies anymore. They just hire economists to argue why their monopolies is actually good for everyone. This change in how we handle monopoly has completely transformed the economy. So, instead of finding big companies getting bigger, we now celebrate it, and that's the big reason why tech companies have been able to grow so, so incredibly powerful.
The last thing that helped big tech monopolies is how they leverage also legal power. So, think of big tech companies as players who not only know the tech game but also know the legal game. They have different legal protection with enough money for lawyers, they can patch up any weak spot by combining different laws in very, very clever ways.
One of the favorite laws is something called the NCA, especially Section 1201, which is pretty, pretty intense. So, that section tells you, if you break any digital law, even for a perfectly legal reason, you face five years in prison and $500,000 fine. So, a company can stop this digital lock. They can add this digital lock in their project and then call out anyone who tries to modify or work with them. They basically make it a crime to mess with their business model.
So, take Apple, for example. They put this tiny Apple logo and iPhone part inside of the iPhone itself. Then they claim it's a trademark violation if you use or change some of these parts for repair. So, between this, they control who gets to repair their devices and how.
They also use complicated contract, those Terms of Service that nobody reads, plus agreement that prevents employees and work from talking about the company's secrets. So, it's very powerful when they combine all these legal tools in a way that stops any sort of competitors. So, these companies are not just building team for engineer anymore, they are also building armies of lawyers. And if anyone tries to compete with them, they don't need just to make their project better, they have to unleash, they have to also understand the legal system. And until the other party or side tries to give up. And this is not just in America. These trade agreements, they spread and run worldwide. I'm going to speak about their implication in the Global South in particular.
So, some might feel this is very, very normal. This is how competition should be. But my takeaway is that technology has changed very, very dramatically from someone anyone could think and improve, into something that's controlled by giant companies. So, these days, having great, great technical skill is not enough. You need also a deep, deep bucket of legal battle if you want to innovate in tech.
So, this takes me into how tech used to grow in the past, by the ability of computer system or tech or software to exchange and make use of information, and we call that interoperable system. So, actually, as Cory put it, the technological world that we inhabit today was profoundly shaped by the ability of newcomers to hack interoperable add‑ons, plug‑ins, and features into the technologies that came before them. And actually, this is how all tech used to develop and work this way. So, this is how Microsoft got big. This is how all of these big giants actually got big in the first place.
So, let's take two examples, just what I mean by interoperable, one around hardware, another around software. So, let's speak about breaking the hardware monopoly with IBM. People who are holder than me, they remember IBM in the 1970s, '80s. IBM was this king of computing. They are so, so, so powerful that people called them the Big Blue. But IBM had a problem back then. They had been fighting an antitrust case with the Department of Justice for around 12 years. And during that battle, IBM had to produce every memo, attend countless meetings with lawyers who were very annoyed about this antitrust violation, like about this tech sort of violation. And the scrutiny made IBM extremely, extremely cautious back then about anything that might look monopolistic. So, to avoid the trouble back then, IBM made two key decisions to avoid further antitrust scrutiny.
So, one thing they've done, they used commodity vats, like that any manufacture could buy on the open market, and they also decided not to make their own PC operating systems. Instead, they were getting it from Microsoft. And just to give some sort of ‑‑ Microsoft back then was not this big tech giant. It was really a really, really young company back then. So, IBM voluntarily embraced interoperable component and operator system. And then, something very, very interesting happened. A small company called Finex Computers, figured out how to reverse engineer the one part of IBM that still IBM has as unique, or manufactured by them, which is the RAM shape that made the computer work. And that meant the other company could now make complete IBM‑compatible computers. So, companies like Dell, Gateway, started making this PC clone that could run all the same programmes as IBM computer but cost less money and had better, better features. And because of this interoperability, IBM's monopoly crumbled, and they eventually got out of the PC business entirely.
And the interesting thing is that this decision helped break IBM's monopoly even more effectively, actually, than the antitrust case itself, where they were fighting for 12 years. So, that's an example how you break with interoperable system, actually, big giant.
Another example that probably many people here are very familiar with it, is Apple versus Microsoft battle and Office Suite. So, in the early 2000s, Microsoft had begun this new tech monopoly controlling 95% of the computing computers. So, actually, the first computer I had back then is from Microsoft and has this Office. I use it for everything.
And Microsoft used this power to dominate office software with the Microsoft Office and created a big, big problem for Apple, because Microsoft Office software does not work for Macs, or it works extremely, extremely terribly, making it hard for the Mac user, actually, to share files with Windows user. Let's say I've made a presentation in Windows, in PowerPoint. If I give it to my colleague who's using Mac back then, they could not operate it or make it work. So, most people used Windows back then, which means buying Mac was very, very risky. You might not be able to work with your colleague's file that they created in Microsoft Office or Word Document.
So, Apple found a very clever way. Instead of begging Microsoft to make better working software, they worked to reverse engineer the Microsoft file format. They created something called iWork, their own office suite, which I believe many of you are familiar with it, which reads and writes Microsoft Office files. And suddenly, Mac users could actually freely exchange files with Windows users.
And even better, the Windows user could switch to Mac without losing access to their old file, and this helped save Apple, and eventually, forced Microsoft to make their file for Mac public standard that anyone could use.
So, I would like actually to highlight from this story how interoperable can break these monopolies in two ways. Letting your competitors make compatible hardware, like IBM PC clones, or compatible software like Apple's iWork, and in both cases, the monopoly company could maintain that ‑‑ could not maintain that control once users had really chosen, wouldn't keep them away from their file or programme. This is why they fight so hard to end interoperability. They have learned from history that one of the biggest threats to domination is actually making their hardware or software interoperable itself.
So, there are three distinct types of interoperable, as I mentioned. There's cooperative interoperable, so companies willing to work together, followed the agreed‑on standards, like email protocol. For example, Gmail can send to Apple Mail because they follow a shared standard based on a mutual agreement and cooperation. There is indifferent interoperability, which one company doesn't actually help others. But the one I would like to focus more on about is adversarial interoperability. So, creating an alternative that is created against the original company's wishes. And this involves reverse engineering, which is very, very challenging. So, original company actively tried to prevent it. And the best example I gave with the Apple iWork and Microsoft Office itself.
So, I think the question that what new challenge we found, when we're trying to do this adversarial interoperability is the same as I mentioned previously. So, the big company uses the strategy to stay at the very, very top. Legal tools and business tricks. So, as I mentioned, the DMCA Section 1201 represents one of the most powerful tools against interoperable system.
The company can add simple digital lock to their project and then use DMCA to legally attack anyone who can try to modify these interoperable systems. They also use trademark, but also, there is a business trick that keeps users stuck within their service. As I mentioned, the simplest approaches like buying any company that might become a competitor with you.
And the other part is how they combine all these strategies, so they combine the legal, business, technical one, so it's not in it for a competitor to get past barriers. They have to break down multiple, multiple barriers of protection. So, even if someone is very, very smart and they figured out how to technically connect with a big tech service and reverse engineer anything, they face a lawsuit and there are other sort of barriers they have to overcome.
So, to break both types of barriers, we need, really, new laws that make it legal to connect with and modify existing service, and we need rules that make it easier for the user to leave services without losing everything they've been actually trying or built over there. Okay.
So, going back to the network effect we see in social media. In big tech, give back through what we call the network effect. So, you join Facebook because there is everyone shares photos, updates, and your friend joined because you are there, and their friend joined because they are there, and the cycle continues. And this is how, really, what we call it like network effect, that affects how tech companies grow a massive user base very, very quickly.
So, but getting big is not enough. They need to keep people from leaving. This is where switching costs come in. So, imagine trying to leave Facebook. You would lose all of your photos, your messages, your invitations, your business contacts, and even your connection to friends and family who only use Facebook. And the cost of switching to another service is so, so high that people stay, even if they're not happy with the service itself, because if you move, you really lost all of your data, all of your, like, photos, friends, network. So, it's like being ‑‑ and it gets very, very interesting.
Technically speaking, there is no reason why you couldn't have a different social media service that could still talk to Facebook. So, old computer can run any programme, and just how computer actually is supposed to work, or work in practice. Like how you use Gmail to email someone using Yahoo email, they could theoretically have a different service that lets you keep in touch with your Facebook friends without actually using Facebook.
But big companies don't want to make that happen, since we can't make it technically impossible because of how the computer works. They use legal barriers instead, and they create laws, contracts, digital locks that make that very, very, very complicated. And this is why fixing the problem requires changing law, not just building better technology. And the technology to break free from big tech control already exists, but the legal barriers that will keep us very, very locked in.
Again, how do we support interoperability? Think of today's internet like a bunch of separate castles, like Facebook, Google, Apple, et cetera, keeping everyone trapped inside. And the immediate solution about creating those in these walls. So, one of the very encouraging things that have been happening is the European Union already have been doing the Digital Markets Act, which basically tells big companies, you must let other companies connect to your service. It's like forcing Facebook to let you talk to your Facebook friend, even if you don't have a Facebook account or even if you use a very different social network account.
Another quick fix is allowing what we call a competitive compatibility. So, that means letting the engineer figure out how big tech service worked and create compatible alternatives, like how Apple figured out how to reverse engineer and make their iWork software read the Microsoft Office file. Right now, this is the kind of reverse engineer, it is often very illegal, and making it legal would immediately give the user more, more choices.
The longer‑term solution that we can speak about is actually rebuilding the Internet to be more open from the ground up. This starts actually with fixing our antitrust law, which currently lets very, very big companies buy up all their competitors, like Facebook, buying Instagram and WhatsApp. We also need technical standards that make different services work together by design. And most, most importantly, I would say, we need to protect people's right to modify and control their own technology.
And right now, if you buy an iPhone, Apple controls what apps you get to install, like through the Apple Store. And the long‑term fix is giving this control back to the users. So, we need both kinds of solutions ‑‑ quick fix to give people more choices right now, and the long‑term changes to make sure that big tech cannot lock everything down again in the future.
And this really, really matters, because if you can't fix big tech's control over our digital life, we're going to be struggling to fix many, many other problems in our modern world, so we need open, fair technology to organize, communicate, and work together in all of our challenges.
I want to touch very, very lightly on the implication on the Global South, which is extremely, extremely huge, and that's why it's actually of interest to us. So, the Global South faced double‑double burden. It's forced to enforcing tech laws friendly only to S‑corporation, and the second part, they have to use technology designed for rich country that often does not work well in your local conditions.
So, the technology itself does not work well in these countries, and imagine trying to download a huge, huge software update when your Internet is actually very slow or expensive. Having assuming you always have power and Internet, when you don't, actually, in practice. Again, people in these countries find a very clever way around this problem.
For example, in Syria, during the Civil War, someone created a better version of WhatsApp that worked better for local lead, and ingenuity driver who introduced the ride‑sharing app to make them work better in their city by reverse engineering both of them. And this solution worked because local developers understand local needs better than Silicon Valley companies. So, making technology more interoperable, meaning anyone can modify it to work better for their needs, this would let the countries in the Global South adapt technology to their local condition, instead of being forced to use solutions designed by Europe or the U.S.
And this matters, because technology today is like electricity, actually. You need it to participate in the modern world. But right now, the Global South are forced to use technology that is not built for them, while being legally prevented from adapting this technology or reverse engineering to their need itself.
So, these days, I see myself actually reflecting a lot on many of the problems we have in our technology, in our politics, which always takes me back to the economy, to the growth. And so, I want to leave ‑‑ this is the last slide ‑‑ I want to leave... Why doesn't the slide does not change, for some reason. It's interesting, it's not changing. Okay, it's fine.
A last slide, I leave with a quote from Jason Hickle, an other apologist who's written about technology, climate change, about economy. He says the economy is really this material relationship with what surrounds us, and we have to decide whether we want that relationship to be based on extraction, exploitation, or in care, which is something that we leave out when we think about long‑term impact of what we do currently. Probably a good reminder for our self that everything that we do goes back in a circle to harm the same people who actually started it.
So, I will move to questions and reflection, which we will do as a group. I'm having a problem with changing the slide completely. Would you be able to change it from your side? It was that last one that you have. Can you change it as well. Okay, thank you.
So, we have, I believe, around like 15 minutes for questions and reflection. What I want to try to do, I want to try to do something very new. I want to do some sort of group. Because what I want to do is collect this sort of feedback/reflection, into some work about the session itself. We are going to do the same with the people online. So, we're going to ‑‑ I'm going to try to collect people in different groups for around seven minutes. Then each group is going to introduce themselves. They're going to get to know each other. This is the day before the last of the conference, so make a friend, know people who are around you.
And then, I do have a few questions that we're going to reflect on these questions. I'm also not very fond of these headphones, actually like speaking to people in headphones, when you have them, like, in front of you. It's a different vibe for interacting and hearing people directly. So, I'm going to give you some pens and notebooks as well that we have in the back. And people who are online, we have a Google Doc provided, and we're probably going to do a breakout room to collect, like, all of their thoughts.
And discussion, what we're going to be doing is we're going to report back, like all of this discussion, thought, and reflection, in the mic, so we can have it in the transcript itself.
Would you be able to change the slide one more? Okay. So, that's the last slide. Some things that I want to start with is, again, each one is going to introduce themselves to the group. Then, after the introduction, choose one of these questions that resonate more with you, or something that you want to sort of, you have any thoughts around.
First question is ‑‑ you don't have to answer all of these, just one of them. Like, have you ever felt locked in to a technology service, despite wanting to leave? And what kept you actually there?
The second question: How might ‑‑ if we make interoperability something that is mandatory, how is that going to change the balance of power between users and tech companies? And how might actually that affect innovation and technology?
The third question: What challenges do you foresee in implementing this interoperability as a compulsory?
The last question: How could users actually in your country ‑‑ because we're coming from different places ‑‑ collectively advocate for better interoperability?
So, we're going to do that in the last sort of five minutes. Would that be okay? Let me just try and take this away. I'm going to check with the online people, if they are okay. Yeah, Ghaida, would you be able to open the breakout room and add them there and add the Google Doc, please? I'm going to add the Google Doc again, just in case, for people who did not see it from the very beginning. Okay.
Would you be able to all be ‑‑ and bring that table in as well. Can I? (Off microphone)
>> GHAIDA ALSHANQITI: Hello, I hope all is going well. Have you started the discussion yet? You have questions you want Dr. Batool to answer?
>> BATOOL ALMARZOUQ: Okay, thank you, everyone. I see the breakout room in the online, they also finished. So, what we're going to do now is just that we're going to have someone report from each group. I am very conscious of the time. We have another session immediately after us. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to hand it to group 1, and then group 2, and I will see if we can do the online. If we couldn't, probably just going to catch up with the Google Doc, so I'm going to send it to everyone later on. Would you be able to report out?
>> Yeah, now? That's fine, that's fine.
>> BATOOL ALMARZOUQ: You can just share two or three takeaways or sentences or something that was interesting.
>> IAN BROWN: Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm Ian Brown. We were talking about interoperability in the European Union, first of all, the Digital Markets Act has been in force for over a year, and therefore, messaging services, particularly WhatsApp, have to enable interoperability to other messaging services.
What we've seen so far is it's taking some time for other organizations to develop the technology. Multiple companies are, although we don't know who they all are yet because they haven't said publicly.
One challenge has been, one open‑source organization has been trying to build WhatsApp interoperability into their service based on matrix, which is an open‑source protocol, but they found that the resource requirements are currently too much for them to do that without a specific customer needing it and being willing to finance it, so that hasn't happened yet.
The EU is also considering extending this legal requirement to social networking services like Facebook. That was debated when the law was passed. The European Parliament wanted that to happen, but the EU governments would not allow it to happen. But after a three‑year review, that may happen next time.
And then, the other point we discussed was, our colleague from the ICRC, they are using Teams globally for meetings with 20,000 people, you said? A lot of people. But they do talk to organizations like the UN, for example, via Zoom sometimes. The European Commission. Occasionally with WhatsApp. So, interoperability could be a useful tool here to let different organizations using different tools bridge, without having to install all the different software in all the different places. The one key point, of course, is the security policy of the ICRC would also have to be met by these other organizations. Thank you.
>> BATOOL ALMARZOUQ: Thank you so much for that. Thank you.
>> So, thank you very much. I'll give an overview. So, our three colleagues, one from Russia, two of us from Kenya, we looked at several issues with respect to interoperability. So, we're seeing that big tech companies are engaged in data privacy violations, financial statement violations. So, we had a discussion, and we are of the opinion that we need to have regulatory approaches to intervene in such violations.
There is need for transparency by the big tech companies in terms of, you know, explaining more about the protocols that they're using, issues of compatibility. There is need for transparency in using the technology. So, we discussed and agreed that there is much more neutrality that is required to ensure that these platforms are interoperable.
We're seeing that issues of big data analytics and the use of algorithms to mine data from users to try to influence our purchasing choices, so there is need also for the big tech companies to have localization of their laws or their terms of use for the different markets in which they operate. Because many times, you find that they apply their own local laws in different jurisdictions, and it causes some kind of conflict because different parts of the world have different cultures, and therefore, different content might be offensive in one part of the world and not the other. Thank you.
>> BATOOL ALMARZOUQ: Thank you so much for sharing such interesting reflection and thoughts. What we're going to be doing is, if you have taken notes, I was ‑‑ I wanted also to share the one in the online, but I'm very, very conscious of the time. So, what we're going to be doing is anyone who shared written notes, if they can give it to me, or even their contact. We will be sort of sending all of these reflections to everyone who sort of joined the discussion, online or in person, so we're going to be producing some sort of report about this session itself and share it with everyone that is going to have also everyone's names, if they're comfortable sharing their contact and names.
I'm really, really thankful for everyone who joined, especially the ones also online, and also for Ghaida for facilitating the online discussion. Thank you so much, Ghaida. And with that, we're going to be closing the session, so we allow the next session to actually prepare. Thank you! Thank you very much. Thank you.