ETNO to take part in the Technology Policy Institute’s 2013 Aspen Forum

Luigi Gambardella, Chairman of the ETNO Executive Board, will take part in the 2013 Aspen Forum organized by the Technology Policy Institute. The event will be held on August 18th to 20th  in Aspen, Colorado.

The Aspen Forum “Creative Destruction and Growth: Policy Choices” will bring together several leaders from business, government and academia to discuss key public policy issues affecting the ICT sector. The discussions will focus on competition, privacy, data security, trade and other regulatory policies critical to the development of the digital economy. Panelists will reflect upon the role of the policy environment in giving market players the right incentives to keep innovating and developing new services, thus allowing the digital economy to evolve and flourish.

Among the invited speakers, key representatives from the public sector will include Julie Brill and Joshua Wright, both Commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, and Evan Kwerel, senior economic advisor at the US Federal Communications Commission. On the private sector side, numerous top-level delegates will intervene, representing a variety of key ICT companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Dish, Facebook, and Time Warner Cable.

Mr. Gambardella will participate in a panel titled “ Privacy, Data Security and Trade - Policy Choices”, along with Julie Brill, Erika Mann, Managing Director for Public Policy at Facebook, Bernie McKay, Vice-President of Intuit, and Alan Raul, Partner at Sidley Austin LLP. The focus of the panel will be mainly on data protection rules, addressing in particular the following questions: how can the different EU and US approaches to data protection be reconciled?  How will they play out in the context of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations involving trade in digital goods and cross-border data flows? 

Mr. Gambardella will bring a contribution about the ongoing reform of EU data protection rules and will express ETNO’s support to the scope of the draft Regulation adopted by the European Commission, which foresees that all companies processing data of European citizens, regardless of their geographical location, should comply with the new rules. He will also call for the inclusion of an improved risk-based approach to data processing within the final text of the legislation, in order to better balance the protection of privacy and the need for innovation in the digital economy.

More information about the event, the agenda and the speakers can be found at: https://techpolicyinstitute.org/aspen2013/.