 I'm very happy that you're all here for Svelhilović. He works at Brotfödiveld and is for commerce, world commerce, and environment politics. That's what he does. And you may know him as part of Brotfödiveld for Bidsen Boime. So I'm very happy that he's at a congress and talks about justice 4.0. And justice especially in the digitalization in the global south. Thanks when for being here. Well, thanks for the invitation to the Case Computer Club for this talk. So as I said, I work at Brotfödiveld for environmental policies. And before I start with the talk, I want to do some introduction. Why we at Brotfödiveld actually talk about digitalization. Brotfödiveld, so it's bread for the world, which was founded 60 years ago. It's active in 100 countries and we have 1300 partner organizations. And the most thing we do is like it to enhance living conditions for people in poor countries. And so we want to overcome injustice and inequality, especially in health, education, rural development. And we also think of other topics like economic topics, climate change, resources and trade. And trade and resources very much affect people in the global south like indigenous people or farmers in smaller countries or people in the Amazon. And also digitalization also has a huge effect to the working conditions of people. We see for example that some partner organizations use digitalization during their work. So for example in Congo, they use drones to transport drugs into some areas. And others say that they are more and more surveilled by technological instruments or devices. And so we have multiple colleagues who said, well, we should also think about the risks and also the chances that we have using this digitalization. I especially look at this from a trade and economic point of view for two years. I did this very intensively. And Justice 4.0 was our publication to this topic, which was released some month ago. And I want to present this, well, publication. So what are the risks and chances of digitalization for people in the global south? There are many actors who see this very optimistically in the sector. And there's a lot of potential that poverty and inequality can be overcome by these technologies. I just want to quote one of our ministers who is responsible for this in Germany, said, new technologies increase the speed of our life, make it more transparent and more efficient, more people can share more knowledge. Yeah, you get more people will create new companies in small garages. And so that's important. So what this means? There's one thesis which says they will build totally new markets with which will grow rapidly. And so that will lead to the increase of money for people. And also people think that the global global trade will be more efficient, more productive, more transparent, and have increased value chain at the beginning. So this is what people believe. And what I want to do in my talk is to to look at these two topics and see what has been actually real, what has been actually realized, and how and how they will be done. If they will realize in the future, and then talk about some some things, how these potentials can be used more efficiently and more broadly and that and reducing the risks as well. So I want to start with a world trade. And because this is because we have data and empirical data. And the digitalization is there's a lot of speculation how the future will do. And there is you have a very broad spectrum between dystopia and utopia. And but in the world trade, we have just data. We start with digital goods, so which is which are all goods which are digitally produced, traded and consumed. So for example, an ebook, or music, video streaming software, all these kinds of things. And that's the question. So how this this this develop within the last 20 years, which governments and world regions profit from it. And there's a report from the UN about that. And we see that 51% of the trade with digital digital goods are part of Asiatic Pacific region, which is China. Then we have North America and Europe is each of them has roughly one fourth. For Africa, together with the Near East, it's just 1%. And for South America, Latin America, we just have 1%. So if you're looking about Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, these are huge countries. So you see there's a huge inequality. So the inequality with digital goods is even worse than with other goods. Because in those goods, Latin America and Africa at least have 8% together and not just two, which is still too few. World Trade Organization started at least in parts to liberalize digital trade. In 1998, they made the first documents about that, which talked about digital goods, which were liberalized. So they have to know customs. So they defined that it's not allowed to have customs on digital goods. So what are the effects of this decision of the World Trade Organization? So well, so the responsibilities are at one side for states and on the other hand for consumers and concerns, companies. So for companies, it's good because if you have no customs, because their profits increase and they don't have to pay customs. We as consumers are also happy because if I just want to buy a laptop, I don't have to pay customs for that. So well, added value that will be by customs. So yeah. Okay, but if we see for the southern African part, we see that they have a negative trade. Well, so they import more stuff than the export. So they just get a deficit for trade in general. So Malawi, for example, is almost almost 80 million US dollars. I see 70, but well, and also countries like countries with a higher industrial grade like Mexico or Thailand, South Africa, they also have a negative trade balance balance. So so you see they have like around 200 million US dollars. So all of them really have deficit here negative value. But in 1998, this moratorium is this moratorium should be time based. So it was all for all two every two years. This is prolonged. The industrial countries, of course, want to change this into a permanent memoratorium. And many developing countries are against this, not just because of the negative numbers, but other but they have two other arguments against putting this into a permanent moratorium. Because especially poor development countries rely heavily on customs for their state budget like Malawi. So their custom is like 40% of the whole income of the state. So if you don't have those customs, you can imagine what that means for investing into health or education. And the second argument is that customs can in can start economic and political restrictions and like, yeah, so they can lead the markets. So 3040 years ago, like countries like Singapore wanted to, to protect their local industries against international competitors. So they want that so they protect them. And this is this is not possible if there are no customs against international competitors. So digital trade changed a lot within the last 25 years. So you get a lot of new products, new ways of doing stuff. So we can't actually imagine a life without digital values and and like hotel online reservations, Amazon, etc. No digital services. We can't imagine that. So you see that this is an overview. You see there is data material goods. It's a lot of this is data. The OECD said that data is a tradeable good. And looking at this dynamic. It's not very surprising that you have a lot of trading contracts where you have e-commerce chapters in there, which very specifically manage these how data can be transferred and stuff like that. That is not a coincidence, which the IT industry and the some ministries want to make us believe. But if we want to understand what happens here and which is a big problem between the industrial states and developing countries, we have to step back a huge way 20 years actually in this and look at the Silicon Valley in the 90s and see the tech companies like tech companies plan in the long term and strategically like oil companies. So they don't plan for five or 10 years, but they plan for decades ahead. Look at Facebook, second in the second half of the 90s, they were just starting up. And then in the 21st century, it was clear that they will they will get bigger because they knew that it was and that no one will be able to stop them to become the new world leaders. So you see here some numbers. So today, the big five of the Silicon Valley have this. So they are much more worth on the stock markets than oil companies. But they were intelligent. So they knew that this will happen. And they will get this dominant role, but they didn't say it because they knew that there will there will be people will demand regulation for them and stuff like that. And of course, they wanted to stop that. And so already in the 90s, they thought about how can we what can we do that there won't be regulations in the next 20, 30, 40 years. And they had a very good idea from their perspective. They thought about they will have the internet, they will use international trade law to instrument to use it for their purposes. Because the WTO has just one goal. And that is liberalization and deregulationization. And this is what trade contracts are about. So they want to remove problems for trade and they want to stop them even from popping up. And they were very successful in this in doing this. So in 2000, the US had a digital agenda, which had a whole the whole wish list of the digital of the Silicon Valley was in there, like there's anti anti restriction. So no, no customs, no open source, no local data data storage stuff, because everything can be in Silicon Valley. So all of this should be added to trade contracts. In 2002, already the US implemented the first digital trade contract. And with each of these contracts, they they got more and more of those ideas into the contracts. Since January 2019. Actually, I don't know if you realize that. There's a Trans Pacific partnership with with 11 countries in there, like Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, you can read the list. And those countries had like, okay, there's a prohibition to store data locally and and work on them to no have no open source and no have no customs. So this is now international trade rights. So there's this is permanent. There's no expire. There's no expiration for that. So maybe you will want you may say, well, but the US is not in those countries. So they're not part of it. Yeah. But Obama and the US were part of this contract. And they made the negotiations for that. It was, it was Obama's big project in the, well, in the trade project worldwide, at the negotiations ended, Trump started. Trump wasn't interested to ratify a trade contract that was done by Obama. So that's why Trump just went out of it. It didn't stop Trump, however, in October, two months ago, to have his own negotiations with Japan and which conclude which includes all this stuff that's in there. And the coming year will have will will be interesting with regards to digital age because there will be a mutual agreement between. Yeah, so there are the friends of e-commerce. These are some countries like the EU, Japan and China and the USA. They want they announced that they want in 2020 to get a mandate that include regulations like the ones I described before. We don't know what will be the consequences of this. And it's clear that sorry, that that Angela Merkel and her government is behind these agreements. And even though she said that the EU should not follow the model of the US or China, it should go its own way. And I'm coming to the second promise. The digitalization of transport chains should be improved. And this should add the value to the supply chains. A British citizen has looked into the digitalization of developing countries. And he has looked into T pluckers in Africa. And he found out that that the T pluckers wanted to use the internet because it would bring advantages. And he found out that digitalization leads to more communication between actors. And it leads to more efficient work. And digitalization increases transparency of the work. This leads to better management. And the delivery chain can be controlled better. And this is an actually really important aspect. But do the T pluckers actually earn more money now? And then the investigation found out that there are more consequences for of digitalization. So consumers today, because of transparency, they see where the T comes from and under which conditions it was produced. So what working conditions, environmental conditions. And that's important to consumers. And now companies invest more money into the generation of this data. And this leads to having more delivery chains. And also more sources. So you have like 30 producers of the T. And that means more competition for the T producers. And therefore they earn less money than before digitalization. So the first part, the first promise came true. The second promise did not become true. And so the adding of the values is reduced. And the people who produce the product actually earn less money. The production of T. We see that data are becoming more important. And people who have control of the data have power. And the question is, of course, who actually has the data in the data that is obtained in one supply chain is also of interest in other processes. So the economist said that data is a new oil of the 21st century. And I mean, of course, we can't really just say it's like resources. So like natural resources, it's only a metaphor. And the extraction of natural resources and the extraction of data. There are structural dependencies. There are still somewhat similar. But we know that it's not the countries that extract the data. But it's actually the companies who extract the resources. So they, they, they create the pipelines, they create and run the ships. And but on the other hand, the internet is a global infrastructure shared by many organizations. Okay, how much time do I have left? Okay, I come to the conclusion. So the digital trade has, has increased the split between the industrial nations and the developing countries. The liberalization of the digital trade in the context of trade agreements has improved the conditions of the less competitive industries in the poorest countries of the south. And the digitalization of the global supply chains has increased the efficiency of the production and the transparency. But the adding of the value increases in the north, but not in the south. And if the developing countries, sorry, next, if they keep their sovereignty over their data, they may be able to reverse this trend. And it would be better if the countries in the global south are empowered to have their own digital markets and therefore the, the the space of options should not be further restricted for countries and economies of the global south. And if you have two actors, and you treat them the same, then the second point is that it should be possible to create a to protect their own digital industries. This is something that only, that is only possible under very restrictive conditions. The second point is we have to remove the digital separation between the global south and the global north. And it's, and it's not only about access to the internet, but it's, but it's not only about the infrastructure. But the companies who create this infrastructure come from the global north, and then they don't do it just for charity. They just do it because they have an interest, an economic interest. And this happens because the south needs support, so both financial and expertise support for the global north. And the problem is that the monopolies are so massively dominant. And it's extremely difficult for new companies to get established in the market. And this applies to the African, but also the Indian continent. We have here in Europe, a discussion that these monopolies must be regulated. And, well, at least the discussion is going on. It can't be that the regulations and the Mediterranean Sea and the big digital companies have to be regulated on the global scale. And many developing countries need to construct and establish regional platforms or national platforms. And they have, and it's difficult for them to be competitive. And they need, they need free trade zones for this. Africa has made the first step. So there is an African free trade zone for the EU. This means that the EU must interact with that zone. But the thing is that the EU does not only do digital agreements, but more general agreements. There's also you need like trade union platforms and have new government structures. The big difficulty in this is to have trade union like platforms, which has to be well, competitive on a global scale. Well, that might, you may have to just think out a totally new concept, but you need countries really giving money to that. Also, thank you for your, for being here. Thank you very much for the talk. Okay, we have exactly 10 minutes for questions or comments or our discussion. I already see that the signal angel has a question. So in the meantime, you can go to the microphones. What about SSI? So what about direct marketing? Could that solve some of the problems? Could you please explain what SSI is? I have Okay, so the internet hasn't responded yet. So maybe it's about direct marketing. Is that something about itself sovereign identity? It's, that's a concept, but there's no explanation. Okay, so next question. What do you think of the Russian approach that they created for an international alternative for all actual electronic products? So there was a lot of criticism criticism to this. But what's your opinion on this? Yeah, that's, well, I think that's a very good but the very difficult question. I was shortly talked about national data sovereignty. There are two views on that from the human rights perspective, like reporters without borders. This can be very problematic, because authoritarian regimes use this local data storage to control their citizens, of course. So that's one thing. On the other hand, from an economic perspective, we are this this problem must not lead us to prohibit local data storage. Because in that case, the digital market will develop the same will just continue how it is done today. So we'll be just very ingest about the Russian attempt approach, the Russian approach. Well, looking at the current government there and what they do to a civil organizations, I would say, well, I would rather put it into this problem, problem approach. And that's it's authoritative, not good. So that's I think is the important point, the deciding point in that case, what's the use for this state local data storage? Yeah. In the eighties or end of the eighties, eighties, I was in Brazil for the open source foundation. And Brazil had to pay a lot of money for it for it customs. Because there were no PC producers. And at some point, we had to give up because all other parts of the economy in Brazil were suffering that they had such a bad access to it. And if you try to protect the digital economy through customs, then this might be yes, this might have negative consequences. So you said that the local digital economy has to be protected, protected with customs. But how can you solve this problem? Well, it really depends on the case. You're talking most likely about 1998 and backwards that we had laptops, you had laptops that cost five times as much or the nine times as much. So of course, it's an ambivalent things. So if you just have like protection customs without well, improving the local companies, but you can do it the other way around. Yeah, they talked about Brazilian status of that. And well, yeah, now he's talking about politics in Brazil after that and new presidents and et cetera, et cetera. And then they started investing into into local companies. And this is the same thing that Asian countries did. So if you if you have just have protective customs, which prohibit your to support your local companies, but they can't export anything that's useless. So you have to think about that. And what I think about Brazil in special. Well, I used for I worked five years in for a human rights organization for Brazil. So now they actually have a deindustrialization. Now the last 18 years, they really try to export a lot of stuff. And so they and but export actually decrease. So that's like a really bad decision and way. Maybe as an addition. So I'm working for grassroots movement. So there are some people in Kenya, because they can't import 3d printers, they use ways to create their own printers. And so some things are really hard to get or hard to obtain. We also have some more questions from the signal angel and from people in the room. But first of all, I will ask the signal angel. And the other people can talk to you directly afterwards. What? What does it actually mean to not be allowed to store local data? Well, that's about all data. So prohibition of local data storage, different variants. Well, the most far fetch or far reaching thing is that in a multi multilateral, a great trade agreement, all data that is that have that have any that are in any way related to a contract that some had to do with with the commerce, they are not allowed to be processed or stored in local data storage. They have to be in a well, with part of a of a business contract, but it's very far reaching. Actually, again, again, maybe one short comment on your website. There is a block entry on in German. So and also there's a document corresponding dorm and document in English. And then you can read more about this. And yeah, just one more question from microphone one. Trump really likes to destroy a lot of post lane at the WTO. And maybe, maybe this will actually change think something because the referee procedures are no longer a thing. Well, the current developments in the WTO are very controversial. One week after the US totally blocked all new developments there. And then one week afterwards, Trump went to this to this jury. And in 2019, they have bilateral agreements with some countries, very important countries, and they want starting in 2020 to have a plurilateral declaration or agreement. So you have 6065 countries, and they want to agree that we will have ad hoc series, which before that WTO had. And so but they want like, and they want to become a permanent jury like the WTO was first, that is very problematic from a World Trade perspective, because that is what the industrial countries do. And so of course, they don't care for the local for the global south. And then you say, if German saying, if you're not sitting at the table to eat, you will be eaten. Okay, microphone to e-waste with regard to Brazil and e-waste. But how, how does this relate to justice? Also with regard to right to repair and right to modify. So it's not all about just production, but also about repairing things. That is, of course, an important remark. We have been with bits and boy mails, we've been part of bits and trees with where we have like economic stuff. And so I just looked into one small part, because the topic is that the macroeconomic results and and outcomes of this. But of course, I agree with you that repair is important. Okay, I see there is enough potential for greater discussion, maybe something for next Congress. One suggestion. If you are interested, there is an art documentary, which is called Made in Africa, which is about hacker spaces and labs in Africa. And I'm looking forward to talk to you outside of the lecture hall. And of course, you can meet us at the bits and boy mails area. If you have time today. Thank you very much.