 Good morning everyone and good afternoon and good evening. I'm sure we have audience members from all over the world. I'm Jessica dear the director of ranking digital rights and I want to thank you so much for joining us today for our panel our telco is getting a pass on digital rights. I'll give a brief introduction and then turn our program over to my colleague and RDR scorecards program manager Vesna Vesna are who will moderate a discussion with our panelists on the importance of paying more attention to telecom companies and our digital and information ecosystems. RDR is an independent tech policy research program based at the think tank new America in Washington DC. Next slide please. We evaluate the world's most powerful tech and telecom companies according to their public commitments to respect and promote human rights to free expression and privacy. And there are three main principles that drive our work. Transparency is central to accountability, even if not the end goal. It's a baseline that we have to establish so that we can follow progress or note declines. Therefore, in our methodology we evaluate publicly disclosed policies of the companies that we assess it's sort of an open source intelligence approach, primarily because the companies don't tell us enough. And we can't get into their black boxes, etc. So we look at publicly disclosed policies, and we focus on free expression and privacy because they enable a broad range of rights. Next slide please. We publish the results of our evaluations in two rankings, the RDR big tech scorecard and the RDR telco giant scorecard. The two publications comprise the RDR corporate accountability index, and this is our first time this year represents the first time that we've published each of these scorecard separately previously published the RDR corporate accountability index, all at once but thought that splitting the scorecard gave us a good opportunity to dive deep into some of the specific issues related to both digital platforms and our big tech scorecard and telecommunications companies and our telco giant scorecard. Next slide please. Our aim or theory of change is that we want to push companies to compete on digital rights by showing what their policy commitments are what they say they do. To that this will help them improve their their policies and their disclosures and align them more with human rights, and then that will in turn create a global internet that sustains and supports human rights. We also think about our standards the standards that we evaluate companies against as a checklist for how companies can compete in a race to the top, rather than sort of seeking out the lowest common denominator, and this checklist helps them sort of design their policies in a way that that they can have some sort of sense that they are actually doing things that will support human rights. Next slide please. This panel to introduce RDR is inaugural telco giant scorecard, which is our ranking of the policy transparency of 12 global telecommunications companies that operate on five continents around the world. And this is the first time that we've done this telco giant scorecard and done this deep dive into the threats that telecom companies pose to our human rights. Chose to do this because we really think that telcos deserve more scrutiny and public pressure. Since 2015, when we first started the corporate accountability index, our research has shown that telcos are less transparent than big tech, while actually having the potential to do more harm. And the reason why we say they have the potential to do more harm is that they're generally people's first point of access to the internet. They have far more accurate and granular data from their billing, location, from billing, demographic data, location data and behavioral data, and therefore they can pose a wider array of risks, just as a result of both how essential their services are and also the data that they need to collect in order to provide those services. Another aspect that's key to understanding their power is recognizing that they operate at the behest of governments, on government contracts, and when those governments are authoritarian or authoritarian leaning, they can compel telcos to take actions that violate governments, like shutting down networks or installing surveillance equipment. And telcos really have very little recourse, except as we expect them to do to publicly disclose that they are being asked to do these sorts of things. In addition, telcos are increasingly forming partnerships with big tech that can threaten human rights, particularly through targeted advertising and zero rating programs. Next slide please. So today we're talking about our telco giants ranking that was just released on Monday. And over the last six months to produce this ranking, we've engaged a network of researchers all over the world to follow our rigorous methodology to evaluate these 12 companies on five continents in 10 different legal jurisdictions on more than 250 aspects of their policies in three areas. Corporate human rights governance, freedom of expression and information and privacy. And you can get a glimpse here of the results of our ranking with Telefonica taking the top spot, the Spanish based telecom company, and see progressively down down the line, sort of where different telcos fall. Next slide please. And our rankings in our scorecard comprises two main parts, our company report cards, which sort of after our data collection process which includes sharing preliminary findings with companies themselves for their input results are assessed and distilled into these two main products our company report cards and the next slide please. And our key findings. The company report cards include highlights and key takeaways as well as sort of showing how companies have progressed over time. And our key findings, really try to take a bird's eye view of the data that we've collected, and to process it to identify what are the key trends that we're seeing. What are the locations or what are the particular pain points or areas where companies have improved or need to improve the most. And on the next few slides I'll share some of those findings with you each of which you can learn more about in the nine essays on our on our telco giant scorecard website. These findings have been sort of written by our team and and go deeply into not only our data but also the context of each of these human rights, sort of risks. Next slide please. So the main one of the main findings is that there's been some progress but mostly stagnation. All of the telcos that we're evaluating today we're also evaluated in the last in the 2020 RDR index, and I think notably MTN and American Mobile MTN is a South Africa based telco and American Mobile is a Latin, a Mexico based telco that operates around both America and also some in Europe. Their improvements were driven by, they are the ones that improve the most year over year since the last index, and those improvements were driven by, in part by both companies published the first transparency report reports in their history, and also are the first companies to do so on either continent. These transparency reports are addressing how companies handle demands such as content or account blocking, and also what their disclosures are on internet shutdowns. Another highlight or sort of observation top high level observation from this year's data is that telcos are overall less transparent, as I mentioned then their big tech counterparts, and they also score much worse on in our freedom of activity, but they are improving. Telefonica was the only European company to make significant progress as well as you see here in the chart with the third greatest change. And so, and was not only the top company in the overall ranking but the top in every category. One other sort of positive note this year is that no company declined, more than half a point of course we never want to see any decline, but the declines are small. Next slide please. So as I mentioned telcos aren't doing so well on freedom of expression. It's the weakest category on average but also the most improved. This really relates in part to internet shutdowns access now, and the keep it on coalition have reported somewhere in the neighborhood of 182 or documented 182 shutdowns over the last year. And these remain a really critical point where telcos are presenting risks to freedom of expression. Again, this is compelled by governments. They're not taken unilaterally by the telcos themselves but we do want to know as much as we can about when that pressure has been applied so that we can understand what the, what the, what the threats are and what the situation is. Policy enforcement transparency was was an area in that saw a decline since 2020. And we're also a little bit concerned that none of the telcos made any advancements and transparency on how they enforce their own policy, such as detailing behavior that triggers account suspensions or how prevalent those suspensions were. Next slide please. Another area of concern for us is that telcos are also targeting us with ads and using the data that they have access to to engage in the same site types of practices that big tech has been scrutinized for over the last several years. So targeting location, location data, location targeting several, several different ways in which they do this through things like addressable TV so knowing where you are and targeting ads to you through streaming services, or through their own connections, there's location based advertising which is is increasing. And all because of the level of data that they have have identity systems or many of them have identity systems and data management platforms which allow them to create very detailed user profiles that they can then leverage to to generate more profits. We're also operating in many cases at networks. So I think, while we've been very vocal as as a right advocates on the threats that big tech poses with regard to target advertising. I don't think we can leave telcos out of that equation and that there's a lot more scrutiny that needs to be given to them for for that. And what you see on the slide here is some of the ways in which the number of involved companies that that that we did a little bit of supplemental research to sort of try and illuminate a little bit more about telcos and targeted advertising. You can read more in the essay about that but you can get an idea of how many companies out of the ones that we rank are actually engaging in these services, or not services but in these practices. Next slide please. Another area that's long been a concern for us is around that neutrality and in particular zero rating programs. It was really interesting this year that that many of the telcos are five of the telcos that we rank do make strong commitments, not to violate neutrality but several of them continue to offer zero rating programs which, in effect, are programs where telcos will partner with big tech companies making access to their particular applications, free or not to their data plans, so that it biases users towards those applications and actually can end up restricting or circumscribing how those users see the internet and what they think, and the kind of information they can get, again, resulting in risks to freedom of expression and freedom of thought and other human rights. Zero rating can also jeopardize media pluralism, it can enable disinformation, it can actually increase broadband costs and it distorts competition. It's usually done also as a means of attracting new users and therefore more data. I would like to note however that AT&T is the only company that we rank that both fully commits to net neutrality and does not offer any zero rating programs in its home market, which is a positive thing. It seems like zero rating will be coming to an end in Europe soon, but I think it's really worth highlighting that it continues rampantly in the global south and needs to be discontinued. Next slide please. Also, another threat that telcos pose that are, big tech also poses in some ways, but with telcos it's I think much more severe is that there's a lot of inequity between what telcos, the policies that telcos published for their home markets and their policy transparency in their home markets, versus what happens in their, in subsidiaries that they operate either as majority or minority owners. We've been working with a lot of partners in the global south this year to apply our methodology and design research that helps them illuminate what some of the corporate accountability issues and threats are in local markets, and in particular what some of the discrepancies are between how a company operates at home versus how its subsidiaries operate. Obviously government influence and some of the subsidiary markets will create, will create those discrepancies, but we also expect companies when they see this happening again to be transparent about it and to disclose what those discrepancies are. So, a couple of examples, telonor, the Norwegian telco telonor's experience in Myanmar really exemplifies how telcos with parents and democratic companies countries are often forced to contradict their state of human rights positions when operating subsidiaries. So there was the instance recently where the military junta in Myanmar wanted to compel both telonor and redo another company that we rank to install surveillance equipment on their network or to share user data with them. Telonor and redo both exited the country but we're put in a pretty difficult position in terms of what happens with their assets, employees and user data. So this is one of the points of leverage that governments can have over telecom companies that can lead to human rights violations. Other policy discrepancies include reporting on subsidiaries where, for example, MTN and one of its more recent transparency reports didn't include any data for Iran cell. And America Mobile has released transparency reports for its Latin American operations but has not done so for its subsidiaries in Europe. Vodafone as well has a home operating company has commitments to net neutrality but some of its subsidiaries do not. So as much alignment as, you know, we can sort of seek with between headquarters in democratic countries and subsidiaries operating elsewhere would be a positive development. Finally, or not finally, but next slide please. We also in our category and privacy we evaluate companies on their data collection and handling. We, as you can see here there's a lot of room for improvement. And they're a lot less transparent when it comes to disclosing what their privacy policies and practices are. And I'll just note that only Deutsche Telecom the German operator fully met RDR standards by disclosing that it limited employee access to user information, and that it conducted regular internal and external security audit audits. But five companies, including Telenoor did not disclose whether they have a mechanism through which researchers can report vulnerabilities. And many of the telcos we rank also provide very limited options for users to control the use of their personal data and for companies share no information at all, where we need to see a lot more improvement. Next slide please. The Telcom companies can also because of their again because of their relationship with governments and also with other companies they can really act as sort of rallying points or or notes of surveillance. Many telcos or most revealed only a few details about they handle for example third party demands for user information. And many users are really unaware of the full scope of the data being collected about them by their telecom operators. Either in Africa, one of the disturbing trends that we've seen many governments have been forcing telcos to kick mobile users off their plans if they do not agree to link their government ID, or biometric ID to a SIM card, which is basically sort of forcing people into a situation of giving up there, or making those linkages or being able to communicate effectively. That situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the countries in question have no functioning data protection law. And it's also possible that some of this data might be repurposed for advertising here in the US, since the Docs versus Jackson decision earlier this year reversing abortion the right to to an abortion. So many governments that have banned abortion can order companies telcos and platforms to provide information about their users geolocation call records and messaging data. And we'd like to see more policy from telcos that directly addresses what they would do in these situations. Finally, on the next slide. Here's a positive note. The environmental social and governance investor movement is gaining a lot of traction, and particularly in the digital right space. The numbers have really been turning up the heat on a lot of the ranked telcos in the last couple of years. And I think that we're seeing some result there in the fact that this is the first year that every ranked telco has published a report on their ESG governments. This is a really positive step in the right direction. But with the note that most common indices don't cover internet shutdowns or censorship demands and companies can also sort of shop for the most flattering index. There's also challenges in the fact that many of the standards aren't totally aligned there's different providers for different standards but we do see some sort of convergence happening there. That will make ESG standards. It's sort of what they do is offer another lever for pressure by engaging investor investors in particular in sort of the, in the push for human rights. And in a really positive note for RDR, we are really excited to see that the GSMA the world's largest mobile industry group cited sort of wrapped a bunch of our recommendations are our standards into one of its own proposed standards on digital integrity as part of new standards that it's creating for its members. Next slide. I just also would like to highlight for anyone that would like to do research, according to our methodology and standards on companies in their local market or perhaps ISPs or other types of companies. We've recently launched the RDR research lab, which sort of walks people through our approach to designing research for corporate accountability. It is open and we would love for, for others to adopt it and adopt it. And so I wanted to make sure that I let you know you can produce similar research and scorecards to the ones that we've done here. Finally, next slide. I would encourage you any questions that you have as a result of sort of this very brief presentation of our findings to put them in the slide box. And our panelists as Vesna leads that discussion may be able to answer some of them. And so for the moment, I want to thank everyone again for being here and then I would like to turn over to our panel or our launch of this launch event to Vesna Vesnar, who is our scorecards program manager. And she will lead us and our excellent panelists and in a really interesting discussion I'm sure on sort of with our telcos and where are we going. Thanks, Jess. And welcome everyone as well. Good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning, depending on where you're joining from. I'm joining from Budapest, Hungary. I'm the program manager at ranking digital rights, and I'll be moderating the session. And again, please feel free to drop your questions will be monitoring them. I would like to invite our panelists to briefly introduce themselves, starting with Laura and then Jason and then Thomas, and then we turn to the first question. Thank you, Vesna. My name is Laura Occonan or Laura Occonan. I work with Access Now as an investor advocate. Access Now is a global civil society organization that's working to extend and defend human rights in the online space across the globe. I'm personally based in Helsinki, Finland, and prior to joining Access Now I actually spent close to two decades working in the telcos sector leading business and human rights programs. I'm really delighted to be here today and actually contributing from this perspective, having been on the receiving end as a corporate representative earlier. So really happy to be here and thank you for the kind invites to ranking digital rights. Thanks very much to RDR for the invitation to participate. My name is Jason Pilamira. I'm the executive director of the global network initiative. GNI is a multi stakeholder organization that brings together tech companies from across the tech spectrum, including of course telcos, equipment vendors, content management companies, cloud companies, a broad range. We also have members who are civil society organizations, such as RDR. We also have academic individuals and institutions and investors as members. So it's a very big 10 and all of these different actors come together under GNI's umbrella to work on protecting free expression and privacy in the space between governments and companies. So where companies and governments are interacting with companies are on the receiving end of demand pressures or restrictions from government and RDR and GNI have long been linked historically. The founder of RDR, Rebecca McKinnon was a founding board member of GNI and I think has talked publicly about how RDR was created in part to supplement GNI because GNI conducts assessments of our company conduct, but they are done in a confidential manner. Based on information that is not public as well as publicly available information and RDR of course complements that by looking at the information that companies make public. So looking forward to getting into some of those distinctions and differences and talking more about this report. Thanks for having me. Thank you then I'll conclude. Hello, my name is Thomas Lohninger. I'm very glad and thankful for the introduction to this great project that really today. I'm executive director of epicenter works we are an Austrian based digital rights organization, and I'm also vice president of every European digital rights, usually based in Vienna but right now I'm in Brussels, and my connection with the telecom world is two fold. So when we are fighting against surveillance legislation we very often find ourselves on the same side with telcos and fighting alongside with them against government overreach, but at the same time, a lot of our work is focused on net neutrality. And for the past decade, we've been trying to get net neutrality in Europe, and not just the law, but also get it enforced, and in that capacity, I've very often found myself on the opposite side of the telecom industry at their shareholder gatherings but also in many many lobby meetings here in Brussels. Thanks all. I would have a lot of follow up questions on your on your organizations already but let's start with looking at the findings and what you found most interesting. I of course have a lot of a lot of aspects of our research that I find very interesting but I would be curious to hear what you were surprised by or what you found. Maybe something that you don't agree with or you think you have a different position on. I think one of the big messages that we see or like something that is very obvious is that tech companies are somehow less transparent on a lot of the issues that we look at. And I would be curious to hear what you think why is that. Maybe we could start with Laura first. Okay, thank you. Yeah, these are very good questions and, as always, as every year, it's super interesting to, to see that the latest results from from the ranking digital rights index. And I think that there's there's something that there's one thing among many that keeps popping up every year and that's actually something that Jessica also mentioned in her introduction. So that's one of the issues related to network shutdowns and the the 182 network shutdowns that Jessica mentioned that were actually documented by access now in our keep it on campaign for 2021. And those took place in 34 countries. So that's 34 countries across the globe. So this is by no means a local issue. It's, it's a global issue. And it seems as if this is a record high number just to give you some perspective, and it almost seems as if authorities in specific countries are increasingly using shutdowns as a tool to censor national events, which always incites and they tend to always incite national security concerns. And the reason why I want to bring this up is the fact that as critical infrastructure providers telcos are required to comply with law enforcement assistant requests and network shutdown requests are an example of a law enforcement assistant request. So whenever we're discussing network shutdowns. We're also discussing telcos who comply with these requests in shutting down, throttling or imposing service restrictions for their users. But having said that on the positive side, I think it's worth acknowledging and mentioning the fact that that some of the newer newer performance in the index MTN specifically. They they've come out really long way it's been very impressive in terms of their performance, and also the fact that they have joined the GNI they've published the transparency report. So that's something that we we should not take for granted, because it does take a lot of work internally in a company to commit to such big steps to respect human rights and protect users. But at the same time, the declining scores for some of the European telcos also indicate that there's no space for complacency companies need to remain committed to their human rights work and to transparency, regardless of whether it's internal or external turmoil around them. But I'll take a pause here and hand it back over to you. Thanks. Thanks Laura. Yes, I agree. Like, with the European telcos, they have like somehow I always feel like they get maybe too comfortable. And some things that we've seen is actually that some of them stopped publishing or updating their transparency reports. And, and after pointing that out, they they return to that but that somehow like seems like a trend, a varying trend, various like as you pointed out with companies like MTN. And they are turning to to publishing their first ever transparency reports these years. So that's an interesting point. And those are the companies which are actually more exposed to government pressure and a lot of the cases as well on the ground. So maybe if since we talked about network shutdowns, I turn to Thomas to see what what's your take on the TGS, which that's kind of hard. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I mean on net neutrality of course that is the huge issue where we seem to really have made a lot of progress since last year in some world regions. And it was already mentioned that the European High Court in a surprise ruling confirmed what we have been telling to regulators since 2016 that serrating in effect is a violation of end user rights and needs to be prohibited. That ruling since late of last year, and the regulators, thankfully have done a good job in implementing it. And we see now a clear road ahead of the extinction of all remaining zero rating products they can no longer be marketed in most countries. And so Europe hopefully will soon join India and Canada as a jurisdiction in which zero rating is clearly illegal. And we see this as the most worrying factor on a global scale right now because, particularly in the global south. So much of the internet experiences of people is shaped by the decision of telecom companies, which services can be access and which can be not. And we have done extensive research in Europe, who are actually the beneficiaries of the serrating products and four out of the top 10 apps were from one company from meta and only three from the top 20 were actually from Europe. So zero rating is always a way to cement the market position of the most dominant global players. And that has been confirmed in another activity we did the Constitutional Court of Columbia recently asked us to give testimony, because they are hearing a case on zero rating, which could really be a watershed moment. The Constitutional Court of Columbia has really taken a lot of time to investigate this issue thoroughly and invited many international experts to give testimony, and the opinions by the experts is actually quite clear that zero rating is a human rights violation. So in Columbia, the main beneficiary of this product of these programs is Metta with their services Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And that situation is the same in Brazil, many African countries so I think many people are not looking at the court in Columbia to hopefully get a favorable ruling. It's expected in January February. And no matter the outcome I think this issue deserves much more global attention. We're to look closer who are actually the services that get this special access. We would see that it is very often the companies that we in the west are criticizing rightfully so for their impact. And if you just simply think about the fact when it comes to fake news if you only have WhatsApp as a means of communication, and you're not even able to click on the link that sent to you to verify whether at least that confirms with the message that you received. So I really think that we need to focus a little bit more when it comes to freedom of expression and responsibility that telecom operators have and simply being bribed by big tech in order to have them in the prime position to these new markets is just not a reasonable situation. Thanks Thomas and yeah I can very much relate to that because we've had many discussions with companies as well. Asking them like how can you commit to net neutrality and offer zero rating person at the same time and and usually the answer was like well in our national legislation it's not illegal to do so so that is where like, I guess it's not legal to go beyond legal requirements that that that doesn't really happen in most of the cases. Jason, I'm very curious what you think about our findings. So, maybe I'll pick up on the question that you asked about why perhaps Delcos are modest parents as some other companies. I think that probably a variety of answers that account for that and then these are different in each company's case. One thing that I think we have to acknowledge from the start is that telcos and internet companies, the kinds of companies that are ranked in the big tech scorecard, you know operate at very different levels of sort of profit margins and resources. And that is not in any way an excuse for not being transparent. But I think it does have implications and I'm curious and I think this report was produced over a period during the pandemic. In particular, I think telcos were resources constraints were a real thing and the number of the companies in the report ended up significantly changing. Their footprint globally withdrawing from certain markets and sort of restructuring their approaches consolidating, you know, particularly profitable markets and so there's been a lot of change in the telco sector in this period, which you know, there's been more to do with kind of broader economic and pandemic effects, but it'd be interesting perhaps to explore how so that may have had ramifications for the findings of the report. I think another really important and probably obvious to everyone on this call distinction to highlight is the fact that telcos operate in a different legal framework than other top companies or content, user content, and that is because telcos generally have to, they have to comply with domestic legal laws, just like any other company but they specifically have to agree to licensing conditions in order to be able to access their internal communications infrastructure to be able to build out additional infrastructure. The both the specific kinds of the law and the related licensing agreement and the regulatory oversight of those activities is much more developed in most cases, then it is these to be you generate content companies. Now that's beginning to change as we see more and more government take a more proactive approach to content related services. And that's, I've been saying necessarily we saw earlier this year just last month, the government of India proposing in its new telecommunications bill to create the authority to require what they call over the top companies to register for licenses in the same way that telecommunications companies do, telecommunications companies do, and I think that would have been pretty significant and largely negative impacts for free expression and privacy. We said as much in a statement that that you and I put out submission to that the So we can go down that path later that would be of interest but I think that's an important distinction. I think it's also just worth recognizing when it comes to the interaction between these companies and government. The fact that the telecom companies are there, pursuant to a licensing arrangement the fact that they have to have by virtue of their, their operational footprint, both large staff in country as well as, you know, large investments of equipment. They therefore are under more pressure from the local government that government has more leverage over them than that same government would have over a meta or Google who may or may not have staff in country who don't necessarily have significant equipment. They don't need to have servers in every country where they operate and tend to take decisions very carefully about where they will put both staff and physical infrastructure, including looking at human rights considerations. So telcos, once they're in the country, you know, are going to be more vulnerable to government pressure, and that can certainly have impacts on transparency. So those are sort of some high level kind of distinctions that we know what's going on and happy to go into that later. Thank you that's very helpful. That's something we've also been discussing a lot actually when we started thinking about the outputs for the taco giants court cards and these things that you mentioned came up a lot. But the other thing that we also discussed it is that maybe this is only for us but it feels like that there's less scrutiny on tacos or like we, we tend to focus a lot more on on digital platforms big tech companies. So I'm wondering like if this is just our feeling or this is something that we see or feel because of the media and information environment or if you all think that that tacos are actually getting a pass on digital rights and what happened to to the critical discourse around telecommunications companies, which was much more prominent six or seven years ago and it seems to be less visible these days. Thomas. I can, I can try to answer that. I mean, I've also been around, I think, like in the digitalized field before and after the shift has happened. And it certainly has happened. It's important to still keep the frame of big tech and big telco, because we are speaking on both accounts, but very powerful, multi billion global companies that have a tremendous impact on how we can use digital technology and how our fundamental impact is impacted by these technologies. If you would weigh the potential for damage, then of course I think big tech still comes out on top. It's it's it's rare that the company would measure the hiccups in general science as Facebook was saying, ah, let's not have another Myanmar. And of course telcos are localized companies and so there's the government influence as was mentioned is rightfully something that needs to be taken into consideration. But it's also something where we need exactly projects like this on the global community that is watchful. I did myself on the street with huge group of activists from our organization and from local diaspora because a one the telecom Austria was shutting down the internet in the midst of the Belarus. There were policy protests, and they were entering that market, knowing that this is the last estate ship of Europe, knowing that they would allow the government to basically shut them off at any time. Because they are gated from the rest of the internet with a state owned intermediary. And so there is a human rights application on telecom companies, and they're not just like any other business. So when it comes to regulation should not overlook the differences when it comes to human rights obligations to these types of companies. And I think we have yet to grapple efficient remedies to really address these shutdowns. This has recently launched an OCE complaint against a one because of Belarus. That's definitely one avenue litigation, but I think just public pressure and projects like these are also important to remind them on their obligation and the frame that the big tech is bad and therefore we should give big telco a pass that's certainly wrong, both have their unique responsibility. And, and particularly when it comes to any form of net neutrality violation that neutrality is never the solution to all of the problems. But if you fail to get net neutrality right, we have lost all of the other problems as well. Thank you, Laura. Thank you just maybe jumping in with with some additional thoughts on on on the whole issue of whether telcos are getting the pass or what happened to that, that active discussion from six or seven years ago. I'd say that your argument is probably to to certain extent, because the back then six or seven years ago, the focus on telcos was really focused that the discussion was focused on how and whether telcos comply with law enforcement requests. That was really the the gist of it, when it came to digital rights. And today, there's them. I would argue that there perhaps there is a general awareness already that in many countries, telcos are legally unable to acknowledge or confirm that requests are being received. This is also this information is also very evident if you if you read the telco transparency reports. However, that discussion needs to continue because the issues remain like network shutdowns. I would also perhaps note that that discussion needs to continue to include an additional element on government accountability, also in enforcing regulation that makes it possible for for companies to be transparent in this respect. I would also argue that perhaps part of the reasons why telcos are, telcos can be received to be flying under the radar to a certain extent is that their business model is also changing. It's not only about LEA requests anymore. It's also about things like targeted advertising and the telco sectors increasing public sector business through their IoT solutions. And, you know, with targeted advertising, it's logical, in my opinion, that telcos are trying to benefit financially from the business models which have been so profitable for social media platform companies. But in their haste to join the chase for advertisers. I think that perhaps telco should also pause to understand the specific issues and the risks that we've been discussing for so long with regards to the social media platforms, because they actually have the, not only the responsibility but an opportunity here to try to find some of the solutions to issues related to such things as targeted advertising in a rights respecting manner. So, unfortunately, I'm not, we're not seeing telcos doing that, pausing and trying to find solutions in some of the issues related to targeted advertising. Again, because that business is proved to be very lucrative for the social media companies. In addition to targeted advertising. Another one that I also mentioned is the increasing IoT business, the public sector business that telcos are in many countries. And while it's not really consumer facing. I think it's important to understand that part of the their business model better as well, because it also often involves telcos doing business directly with oppressive regimes to improve the countries overall digital infrastructure, but also to do different public sector projects like smart cities for for the governments of these countries. And in discussing transparency, and the telcos need to be transparent. I'm wondering to what extent that that balance, or that aspiration for transparency is being impacted. Not only because of the regulation that prevents them from doing so, but also the by the increasing financial financial benefits, if they work nice play nice with those governments. So, there are many things that are changing also with the telcos sector and their business models. So, perhaps we are also just at that point where there's a there's a next step, next stage of the, the telco evolution. That's happening at the moment. The earlier discussion is, is sort of clear what the issues are, and the next one with the next ones, or the new challenges were just not quite there yet. And he said that I think that what all companies big tech and telcos alike should keep in mind that trans the expectation for transparency is always there, regardless of your business model, and the business you're in, in any given country. So that hasn't changed. And that underlying theme for transparency should be carried out to whatever business models they develop. And I think I'll post here. Thank you. That was a very comprehensive analysis, I think, and I'd like to follow up on that and also what Thomas was talking about in relation to operating in in operative and authoritarian regimes and that's something also someone asked from the audience and like, that's coming up a lot in our discussion as well. Like, what is, what is it that a telecom company can do when they choose to enter an operative or like a dictatorship in case of Belarus. And I think like, I understand your arguments, Thomas when you were saying like well they decided to do that on the first level, they should also like acts in accordance to that decision. But then there's also an argument saying like well, those people in Belarus actually need, need to be able to connect somehow to the web so I think that's something I'm I think telecom companies struggle a lot with as well and, and I would love to, I don't think there's a clear answer to like what is their responsibility what is their role how do she, how should they operate in authoritarian regimes but I think it would be great to hear some of your thoughts around like what can they do. If you could talk a little bit about responsible disengagement because that's something also we see that companies like telling or actually need to leave the market for for human rights reasons and not just business reasons. I don't know who would like to go first. I'm sure that there are others Jason probably has a better global perspective and this might I would take would be that. I mean, human rights impact assessment you already said it and we have good examples from the industry. And others that that have done these human rights impact assessments and came to the conclusion that certain markets neither have the rule of law requirements. And the fundamental rights protections to operate such a vital service like a telecom infrastructure in a responsible manner, and therefore, it's better to divest or to, to never enter the market in the first place. Of course that leads to question who enters instead. And, and there is sadly no easy solution that that I can come up with but it does not alleviate me as a human rights organization in the country but his companies had quoted to remind them of the role they played. And it's not just a shutdown. It's also handing out location data around demonstrations intercepting telecommunications content data from opposition leaders. There are all likes of things where suddenly the telcom will find itself in a in a very difficult position. Yeah. I can jump in there as well and at some point maybe useful to go back to the question about sort of why hasn't the most attention on telcos that you asked earlier and I think Laura was outlining that there is a real change happening in the business models and the approaches. I think especially with 5G technology, we're going to see, you know, kind of more convergence in terms of the type of report points out the target advertising sort of approach that is not more and more available to telcom operators and I think we're going to start to see more blurring of lines in several classes of distinctions that we thought about between what, you know, what a business model and what kinds of operational challenges and what kinds of legal framework issues a telco company has versus a content management company or a business management company. So we can go back to that. But on this question of authoritarian regimes and dealing with difficult jurisdictions, it's a really important and in some ways just a philosophical question. And I think it'll come off of that well, you know, kind of the pros and cons. And within GNI, you know, our approach is not to say, you know, to draw hard lines or to come up with lists of countries and say you can't go into, there's no way you can operate responsibly in this country or that is this country. We do what we do is make sure that the companies who are members of GNI have the proper systems and processes in place including human rights impact assessments as part of the broader human rights due diligence framework to make sure that they're asking these questions, not just at the point of deciding whether to bid on a license or to enter a country, but throughout their operations and on an ongoing basis, consistent with the broader UN guidance for something that's in human rights. When we do our assessment, which is the periodic exercise in which we bring in independent assessors to look at internal systems and policies that these companies have developed to implement the GNI framework and figure out how that's going to practice to identify learnings from from those experiences and to share them with our board. That's a confidential exercise, but as you can imagine, we end up focusing quite a bit on these types of jurisdictions, other jurisdictions that have had recording rule of law and human rights challenges or jurisdictions that have shifted over time and that's something we also have to acknowledge is that a company might decide to go into a country at a certain time when things, you know, maybe aren't so bad and then over time, as is the case in Myanmar, there can be changes, those changes can happen slowly or in the case can happen quite quite quickly in the broccoli, not to say that those potential outcomes weren't foreseeable or or at least, you know, couldn't have been anticipated as a possibility but all of these sorts of dynamics factor into the decisions that a company has to make. I think, personally, just speaking from myself here, I think it would be a perverse and unintended probably outcome of the broader conversation around business and human rights. If we ended up in a world where Western companies or companies with more developed human rights policies, and it's not just Western companies as this report illustrates very well, very helpfully. But if those kinds of companies that take their human rights and broader business and human rights responsibilities seriously end up avoiding operating in countries where there are significant risks. I think that that will end up having more negative effects for the users in those countries for the potential for those companies to be part of a broader project of opening of transformation. And would be the case if, you know, if they if they are willing and able to take risks like telling or going into a market like Myanmar, notwithstanding the challenges that they knew they would have and the potential for the kind of backsliding that we have seen. So it's a fine line. I think, you know, different digital rights activists make decisions about how they want to advocate around that issue. And I think it can be really challenging for the companies, because sometimes they feel like, you know, again that they do and they're done but they don't. It's definitely a conversation that's really important to have and I'm really glad that that you all have highlighted that and I think that's something that we can certainly talk about more in public spaces as well as private ones to really just understand the proposal and content how we can work constructively collectively to incentivize companies to operate responsibly even in the most challenging circumstances. Thank you, Jason. I think I have a follow up question on that that is actually addressed. I would like to address to you which is about how can we help companies in doing that and I think it would be very interesting to hear about your experience, I think it's a really nice experience in terms of engaging with tech companies. If it has been different in any way from engaging with big tech companies for instance and and what I mean you've already mentioned a lot of the challenges but what benefits do you see in taking and participating in such multi stakeholder initiatives or like just in general engaging with civil society. And then maybe if Laura and Thomas you could talk about your experience experiences with engaging with companies or Laura if you can talk about your experience as a company representative engaging with civil society in general I think that would be helpful to hear about that. Very quick there on the question so what we can do more broadly and then I'll see what you and I know. I think one thing that would be helpful and I was thinking about this as I was reading the executive summary and the framing for this report is to acknowledge that, you know, the companies that you have looked at here are a relatively small slice of the overall industry, and that's even more the case with the telco giant report than it is with the big tech scorecard like the big tech scorecard, focuses on the biggest companies and biggest companies in terms of the user base really do represent the vast majority of the services that people interact with around the world on a day to day basis. On the telco side, many people on this call and most people in the world have a telco provider that is not covered in this report right and I know RDR has been doing great work to open source methodology and to help facilitate and encourage more sort of regional and country specific work and that's a really good thing but I just think in terms of framing the conclusions of this report, it can be easy to look at this report and say oh gosh all these companies, you know, they all got a failing grade, they're not doing very well. But if you compare these companies to the vast majority of telecommunications companies including state owned telecommunications companies that are out there in the world. They all of a sudden look a lot better in terms of the kinds of, you know, public experiences that they divide and then, you know, implicitly beyond that, you know, what they might be doing internally that they can't or they aren't yet talking about publicly. So I think that a little bit of that kind of context and perspective would be useful, because I know the companies sometimes feel like, you know, they're getting beat up on despite the fact that they are in their leaders among the peers right but they are the ones, despite the the fact that they are getting this very rigorous and sometimes quite critical attention. So that's one thing to speak about what GMI does and the conversations we've had with telecommunications this year we are just concluding our fourth assessment cycle as an organization GMI has been around for 12 years. This is the second cycle where we have had equipment vendors and telecommunications companies. Part of the cycle that joined in 2017 and Laura was a part of that and she was at Nokia. And it's been really interesting to see as they have gone through now their second assessment to the GMI assessment trend that is oriented towards identifying for each company, whether they are implementing the GMI principles and implementation guidelines in good faith with the GMI timeline. And obviously that second part the improvement over time can only happen in, you started to have subsequent assessments because you have a benchmark against which to, to measure improvement. And so I can't talk about the details and the findings of that we haven't finished it yet we will put out a public assessment report next year that will talk about the process and some of the learnings and where possible talk about some of the details and things like that but but in general I just say, you know it's been interesting to see the progress over time. And to see, you know how telecommunications companies are able to learn from some companies that are in other adjacent sectors, whether that equipment vendors or whether that user generally content, content platforms. I'm not a full person right and I alluded to this earlier but you know we are seeing a shift in the global legal framework with more and more countries requiring user generated content companies to put staff in country and make them sort of legally accountable and responsible and liable for potential violations of domestic law. That is a dynamic that telecommunications companies have been doing for decades. Right. And so, there are potential lessons that the companies that are now being forced into that uncomfortable turn from telecommunications companies. There are all kinds of very interesting experiences that companies have in terms of jurisdiction with kind of innovative approaches to dealing with government demands that they can share with confidential space that other companies can pick up on and potentially adopt another thing we've seen more and more of in the cycle as companies sort of become more accustomed to the assessment process and more information is shared. So I think there's, you know, from where I sit there's a lot of really rich learning and a lot of notable progress that we're seeing and that's great. I understand that some people will be frustrated by the fact that that is all happening confidentially and behind a closed door that they can't necessarily peek into. But my hope is and this is something consistent with the RDR mission is that as companies become more comfortable talking about these things in a closed environment with other stakeholders including some society and academia who are often quite critical publicly of those companies that they will eventually become more comfortable also releasing that information will draw them to the public and to having more conversations around those topics with stakeholders who are not necessarily GNI members. So over time, I think that has been the trend with companies that have been GNI members for a long time. And I'm optimistic that that will continue to be the trend. So I'll stop there. Thank you, Jason. Laura. Yes, thank you. Yes, experiences on and potential benefits in engaging with civil society from a company perspective. Well, to be honest, I hope that the fact that I chose to leave the telco sector and join the civil society is a testament of my positive experiences in engaging with civil society from the past. And that really truly was always immensely valuable in not only in doing what we did on a daily basis but testing out new ideas and really trying to understand what adds value what information in terms of disclosures for example adds value for the civil society information that they need. And access now was already in the picture about 10 years ago with with with my work. And I think that one of the keys for the for the business and human rights personnel in the corporate sector is to really try to understand and identify those critical friends from the civil society who will who will provide that value for you will understand your business, and who are able to critically assess the information or the ideas that you want to discuss them with. And, and in that regard, I really have to hand it out to the RDR as well. I do remember from personal experience the amount of time that the RDR takes to engage with all the participating companies to make sure that you provide an opportunity for the companies to comment on the preliminary results, and to let you know if there's something, if there's something that they do not agree with, or so on. So I can only imagine the amount of time that takes from the overall assessment. But having said that, I think that already are the RDR and access now are very good examples of efficient corporate engagement that actually adds value for for both parties because in that process I would argue that both parties are very similar as well. So with that. Thank you. When you started talking guys started thinking about how difficult it was sometimes for us to actually explain the importance of transparency to some of the companies and, and I'm wondering like if Thomas, if you had very similar experiences because I think like, as Laura was saying, on the civil society you don't understand the internal business considerations and how the business is built, but then we have our human rights demands and then from the company side, sometimes I had the feeling that there is like not at the same understanding around the importance of transparency and the freedom of information and, and I wonder if if Thomas you had a similar experience. I mean, I can definitely agree with Laura that there is a huge benefit for mutual learning. And that the always one should always enter into these debates with an open mind, and with the expectation to be surprised to learn something new, and not to have too many preconceptions about the other side. I do believe that also companies have something like in DNA. Meta will not suddenly become a good company in the metaverse and telecom companies inherently come from the telephony era. And you can see that in so many of their strategic decisions takes your rating. They did you want to sell more than just the gigabytes or the minutes as it were before you want to diversify their products and they are used to termination monopolies they're used to getting money for a call to terminate that's why they want to have right now in Europe and in Europe to similar debate, one have money from the content providers that get accessed by their paying customers. So I think that there is always a part of the company around the business model that you can never change, but that is very important to understand. And then about new products, I think one can actually achieve a lot with these types of discourses. But ultimately I have to be the clunky European here and say that I believe much more in government regulation than companies ability to change on their own. Thank you and I think that's a nice bridge to to maybe the last part of our conversation that we have almost 15 minutes left so all of you mentioned something about the future of the taco industry. You talked about the 5G chain that the changes that 5G will bring to the telecom community, Laura, you talked about how targeted advertising and like the move into the targeted advertising business of tacos have human rights implications on and how they are not really thinking or at least it seems like they are not really thinking about all the things that civil society has been raising the alarm around. Thomas you also also mentioned net neutrality as a key issue that we should be focusing on as like the number one or like maybe the first step that needs to needs to be fulfilled in order to enable the rest of the human rights related to tacos so I'd like to invite you to maybe offer a few forward looking concluding remarks what are the issues that you think tacos and civil society, working with tacos should be focusing on. Maybe Laura, you could talk a little bit about the investor work that you are doing and how you think the investor work that we've been doing around big tech companies could be translated into taco industry. So, should we start with you Laura maybe. Sure, happy to get us going. I think this is partly tied to the to the previous is quite previous question and the previous discussion but in my past experience. Not very many investors engaged directly with their portfolio companies on human rights issues. And I completely understand that it's logical given the size of their portfolios in most cases. And in some respects, the investors who do engage with telco companies. Maybe slightly limited in their understanding of the business models or the most salient issues the most salient human rights issues for the company, or for the sector, especially when it comes to the downstream activities including the use of the companies products and services. And again, I fully understand that given the size of the investor portfolios and they just simply do not have to bandwidth probably, or specific human rights expertise to evaluate or to interpret the responses provided by the companies and by no means am I suggesting that investors should become human rights experts. But what investors can and should consider doing is is engaging more with civil society organizations to benefit from the experience and the expertise from the civil society organizations. Including access now that focuses specifically on big tech and and telco and digital wise issues. And the one of the things that's probably often overlooked is the fact that when civil society organizations hope to engage with the investor community or the business community as such. It's not always directly related to advocacy efforts. So engaging with civil society does not mean automatically equate to your company will be in the news the next day. And I think it's really important to to take that leap of faith and start working together more closely on mutual interests. Because after all, at the end of the day, when civil society organizations are interested in business and human rights and corporate accountability. That's the end goal in forcing corporate accountability. And that's a mutual goal. That's probably, I would imagine shared by civil society organizations and the investor community on their portfolio companies. So there is room for for more collaboration and obviously collaboration, efficient collaboration takes time to develop because it also also obviously always takes trust requires trust as well. So I would just maybe like to close by extending an open invitation for the investor community to consider engaging with with civil society on specific issues that you may want to learn more about, or about specific tech companies or telco companies that you are engaging with, because it is possible to also consult civil society and benefit from that experience. Thank you. Thank you Laura. Thomas. Hi. I definitely see some optimistic outlook when it comes to these types of corporations, but maybe not in the area where you expect it. I mean, we work a lot with corporations when it comes to issues close to us like there are many companies that have businesses around privacy friendly technologies around interoperability, which we see as a very important tool of antitrust of competition because I mean, it's obvious that certain companies are just far too big to still be healthy and splitting them up this is the way to go but as an intermediary step because politicians seem to be unwilling to do that, both sides of the Atlantic. Interoperability is a meaningful way to get the internet open and decentralized again, and that has unique privacy and security concerns that need to be addressed but working together with the corporations that are building this technology to allow this interoperability across the data silos to break up the monolithic blocks of social networks. We see this right now with Twitter. So, thankfully, is an alternative. It's not the alternative that we need in all of its dimensions, but that's exactly the discussion that we should be having because these infrastructures are all too important to just be left to individual billionaires or also to shareholders in my opinion. And then there is another thing that I just wanted to mention. Trust PID. We discussed this before the panel and this new project from Vodafone.com, which is, again, a way to have a solution for targeted advertisement at the end of cookies. It's so clearly a violation of privacy laws and I think, yes, of course, every type of discussion is welcome but at one point one has also to say that breaking the law is not an innovative business practice and there's also a job of regulators and a lot of law enforcement at one point to to also put a stop to certain things. And I think, again, understanding the decisions that have led up to certain projects is important, but only in so far as to hopefully will not be repeated. Thank you, Thomas. And before I turn to Jason, I just would like to remind the audience that this is your last chance to put any questions that you would like to ask because we are concluding this discussion very soon and Jason, the floor is yours. All right, I will turn to the brief. So, a few things I think, picking up on some of what Laura is saying I think that one thing that, you know, I mentioned earlier, the sort of economic environment. And some of the challenges and changes that's part of the sector I think simultaneously one thing, another thing that we have been seeing is more pressure from investors to foreign telecommunications companies to focus on a broader range of economic social and government issues, like the anti-collection has always been a very good fair investors for companies broadly and very material risk, given some of the legal consequences for violating different forms of jurisdictions which can extend globally. Environmental issues I think are increasingly becoming a focus for investors, right, and for having better internal focus and more sort of external auditing and accountability for how companies are moving to climate change and other objectives and those are all great. I think the challenge that we're hearing about though is that this is to some extent spreading thin the teams of people and the resources that are available to address the issue more broadly. And so sometimes human rights and social issues end up getting the short end of the stick. And that's the problem that is not what I think investors, but I think sometimes unintentionally by sort of focusing on something that might be in the headlines or as a priority at a particular moment in time, as opposed to taking a longer term approach to looking at how these things are integrated and can be addressed in a sort of more comprehensive way. So that's something for investors to be aware of. I think with the emerging sort of human rights and environmental due diligence, mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence frameworks that we're seeing obviously are very critical that I think they're very directives it's just been passed that we're seeing someone moved in Canada and elsewhere. There's an opportunity again to identify how these things can be addressed in a more comprehensive way. And so that's something to keep an eye on is kind of how those regular frameworks will have an impact on company decision making, behavior and transparency. And then the last thing is just to say, as I kind of hammered out several times because of the day already but I really do think that there is more convergence happening now and more sort of blurring the blinds as I've said, and that really calls for therefore, more of a specificity to understand and by all actors, industries, regulators, policymakers, companies themselves, human rights organizations in the work with the companies that advocate around the behavior of the ecosystem and how certain risks don't just apply to a particular company but they may be exacerbated by one another company, either up or downstream from that particular company may be doing and the decisions that they're making about how they design or how they make available and products and services. We are, we have been having conversations around that for some time now, and are working with business for social responsibility development ecosystem mapping tool that helps to illustrate this and make it easier for all the actors that I mentioned to understand the relationships between different actors in the ecosystem. We hope to build on that with some case studies we've done one already on the software service that can be a number of other ones on particular sectors as well as particular geographies or particular risk challenges to help illustrate how, you know, how these can be better working collectively collaboratively, not just with each other but also with other stakeholders that can be some of that can be done through GMI but lots of that can also be done in other appropriate terms and mechanisms. It sounds very exciting and I really look forward to learning more about that mapping tool and I would like to thank you all for all your inputs it's been a wonderful panel discussion and I would like to also thank the RDR team, and the new RDR team for for helping with setting up this event and for also preparing the whole publication. You can find our findings on our web page, which I'm sure you are all aware of will be coming out with a few more details through various channels in the future. Thank you to reach out to us if you have any questions about the taco giant scorecard and thanks again Laura, Jason, Thomas have a great rest of your days and to see you soon somewhere in the world.