 Good afternoon. I have personally looked forward very much to this session and I welcome you all to the discussion around the future digital economy. I would like to start 25 years ago in 1989 where two very significant events changed the world dramatically. First of all, we saw the Berlin Wall come down and with that an era of no more Cold War and an opportunity for business to globalize everywhere and that same year the World Wide Web was born out of a experiment in CERN, a need to manage documents and with that of course a significant opportunity for change and transformation. Now, 25 years later, we have for the first time again seen some geopolitical challenges where some of the assumptions of unlimited globalization has been significantly challenged. Yet on the technology side we're seeing an increased pace of innovation and new opportunities. We have in fact over the last only five years or so seen a radical disruption of certain industries starting in the music industry. Any product that could be a hundred percent digitized was digitized and the consequences were quite significant for those companies that were in those industries. In many ways you could argue also for the better more efficiency, efficiency in reaching customers and in efficiency in supply chains. Now we believe that we've only seen the beginning of this transformation and it is in sharp contrast to the geopolitical challenges that we're seeing. So today we'll talk about what is needed in ensuring a thriving open and secure digital economy, a global digital economy and I am for a change here on the panel asking the question because this is a rather easy question to ask but not so easy to answer. We have a distinct panel and I'm proud to introduce our four panelists very briefly. They namely don't need long introductions. Shell Sandberg, COO of Facebook, member of the board, but also member of the board of a number of companies and institutions including Walt Disney, welcome. Eric Smith, joint Google 2001, executive chairman of Google and also I must say the co-chair of Davos this year and a long supporter of the World Economic Forum. Thank you for that Eric. We have Sacha Nadella. He is the CEO of Microsoft, joined Microsoft many years ago, 1992 yet took over the leadership role approximately a year ago. Lots of change at Microsoft since then and I must say a significant launch yesterday of Windows 10. So we're very pleased that you made it here. And Vittorio, Colau, CEO, Vodafone, joined Vodafone 2008 and Vodafone being one of the few true global players in the infrastructure needed to support this digital economy. We had a session earlier with Merkel where someone talked about the plumbing. I think we agreed on the highway for the digital economy. Welcome. Thank you. I'd like to open this discussion with a brief introduction by each of the panelists on the vision for the future. What is your vision for the future state of the digital economy? And are you generally spoken optimistic or pessimistic about that future? And why? And Vittorio, would you start that? Let me take it in reverse order. I am absolutely optimistic because I see a movie in front of me and I know the end of the movie and I see in the 30 to 50 countries where we operate in a little bit where the story is today. And I can tell you the story is absolutely at the beginning. It's just the beginning of a great story. And if you think that the movie is a movie of everybody connected with very low latency, very high speed, ultra dense connectivity available for objects and human. And you see where we are today. You say you're really at the beginning of something amazing. What we are seeing is a complete change in the way people farm in Turkey, where we have the largest farmer club improving productivity, the way people manage their health, the way people are educated, 240,000 people in Egypt are educated through our technology. 60% of them women, by the way, which was not possible and probably not affordable until the beginning of the movie. Education of teachers, South Africa, inclusion. We talk a lot about mobile money in emerging markets. One third of Kenya's GDP goes through payments. Finally, women have secure and the youth have a secure place where to store the money and they can save time and increase productivity. And then you go into mature markets and energy savings and smart buildings and whatever. The beautiful thing that Google are working on. And I see the freeing up, not just of productivity and money, but also positive energy, which can really bring a more equal word. And so if you move the movie to the last scene, which is going to be 10 or 15 years from now, you can only be very optimistic. Now, it's going to be hard to get there and we'll discuss how we get there. Thank you very much. Is that you? You know, I'm optimistic. There's no question. I mean, I think everyone in this panel, as people who are in the technology business, you have to be optimistic about what technology does. But the thing that I'm most grounded on is the role of technology. Ultimately, to me, it is about the human capital and the human potential and technology empowers humans to do great things. And so you have to be optimistic about what technology can do in the hands of humans and how they exercise that. Now, I think the key issue, though, is there needs to be a new global consensus, which I think was what we will probably talk a lot about in this panel that allows technology to progress and yet find that balance with what I would call legitimate interests that individuals have, societies and cultures have and governments have. So I think that in order for us to truly see the benefits of technology, we need to get to that global consensus. And to your movie metaphor, that's where things can go wrong. And in order for us to have a happy ending, that's the discussion that we all need to have. Thank you. Eric, are you as optimistic? I think I'm the most optimistic of anyone you're going to find. We've spent the last couple of decades here talking about the transition to all the world's knowledge. We now have basically available to us through many apps in many different ways, companies representing this room, et cetera, this enormous amount of information now. And new developments in machine intelligence will make us far, far smarter as a result. And this means everyone on the planet. The Genetics Revolution has a huge and positive impact on the way we'll treat disease, progression of disease, and so on and so on. And it's all basically because these smartphones are really super computers and everybody here has one. An interesting statistic is that on the order of 400 million people in the past year got a smartphone. And if you think that's a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in a developing world. And as a result, the globalization that this forum and that all of us believe in has produced ties that bind. It is no longer possible for a country to sort of step out of some basic assumptions in banking and in communications and in morals and in the way people communicate. You cannot isolate yourself anymore. You just doesn't work. So if I go forward, I imagine a whole new generation of technology and ideas. Think about a computer that gives you enormously personal, helpful advice. What should I do today? What am I interested in? Where should I go? How do I make these choices? Think about energy. We're all concerned about climate change and all those sorts of things. Much more efficient energy usage, a huge issue for the planet. Greater personal security for all sorts of ways and reasons. And think about learning and education with all the new tools that are being built. We're on the cusp of an acceleration of the level of impact of that and it's almost overwhelmingly good. Thank you very much. Any pessimism? No, not for me. I want to answer the question with three stories. Two brothers in Tamil Gong, India lived in a village where you couldn't get to a hospital because there was no road, so people died. And so a couple of years ago, they built a Facebook page. They raised $100,000 and they built the People's Road to China with volunteers they recruited. Last year I was in Korea. I met a woman named Kai Young. She had saved up to go to law school but then she took her law school tuition, dropped out of law school, and built an app which would enable you to find same-day hotel rates. And she now employed eight people and was starting to move out to other countries in Asia. And then just last month at Facebook, I met a woman who's become one of my heroes named Masi. And she started a Facebook page which now has 750,000 followers called My Stealthy Freedoms. And this page has pictures of women. They take themselves in Iran, out in the open without headscarves, which is a punishable crime. And there's a photo on this page of a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. And the grandmother says, I wanted my granddaughter to feel the wind on her hair before it was gray. That's why I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic because these three stories happened in a world where only 40% of people have internet access. And if we can extend to more people, we increase voice. And importantly, it's not just them learning from us. It's us learning from them. It's us understanding Masi and the world she comes from. We increase economic opportunity and we're going to talk about job creation. Technology is both a destroyer and a creator of jobs, but it really brings economic opportunity like you see with the young woman in Korea. And we increase equality. Women are still much less likely to have internet access. Women are much less likely to get phones. Women are much less likely to get educated. And that's holding all of us back because we know that women invest in their children when they have access. And so I'm a huge optimist because if we can do all this with 40%, imagine what we can do when we get to 50, 60, 70, and hopefully everyone. Oh, so there we are in a more concerned Davos than last year. Here's a panel of optimistic opportunity. It sounds like optimism for human beings, for society, for everyone. I think that's a good start. I'm also hearing some pretty significant change. So let's talk about the change first. And maybe coming back to you, Shell, Facebook has changed the way we interact with each other. No doubt. The term friend has a new meaning. Where do you see that going? Are we going to accelerate that pace? Are we becoming more old-fashioned? Where do you see the interaction between people going in terms of change? I remember the old internet joke where you had the dog in front of the computer. And it said, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. And that was because the internet was anonymity. No one would put their real name or face on the internet. And that really changed a change with social networking, a change with Facebook. And I think that's really important because this is the historical shift from the historically powerful to the historically powerless, because everyone has voice. If you think back to before the technologies that everyone up here deploys and develops, if you wanted to reach the world and you were not someone who had access, what would you do? Piss out flyers? Now everyone can post. Everyone can share. And that gives voice to people who historically have not had it and I think represent something truly profound in the world. So you're saying it will reduce the divide, not increase the divide? I think it does. I mean, certainly there are a lot of divides which are increasing, but if you look at the power of technology and particularly social technology, it gives people voice, more equal voice than we've had before, and we've seen those impacts on the world. Thank you. Satya, you represent not just the consumer side of things, but also business technology. I've been in the IT industry myself for 25 years, seen some pretty significant changes to the way you run business. Talk about that transformation. Yeah, I mean, our core identity is all about providing the platforms and tools for others, both individuals and organizations to take advantage of technology and transform themselves. So we have over a billion customers who use our productivity services and we have over a hundred plus a million businesses we deal with. And when you see what they're doing, it's very diverse. Just this week, in fact, there was this fantastic story. In fact, Eric was talking about machine intelligence and the story I came across was someone who was a pig farmer in China is using machine learning to get much better at being able to produce things that can actually get to market and make them a profit. Now, who would have thought? And they're doing it with a simple app that's running on their phone, but they're using intelligence that's running on the cloud. You go to even come to Switzerland, there's a company in Switzerland that builds a banking solution, Terminus, which is a very successful company out of Switzerland. But the most fascinating thing is that they've been able to take that software, run it in the cloud and get banks in Africa to be able to run these banks in half. So that means if you think about financial inclusion in Africa, which requires credit lending institutions and banks, the ability for something like that to start up is sort of come down in a pretty big way. You even take a set of volunteers, parents, their access to technology is increased to a point where Type 1 diabetes children and their parents came together and built a cloud solution to be able to monitor children with Type 1 diabetes wherever they are instead of hovering around them when they're at games so that they can get alerts when things need to be attended to. So that's the kind of diverse digital transformation that we are seeing because one, the costs and the barriers have come down and the ability for groups, small businesses in particular, one of the things that we did was a recent survey which shows that small businesses and their access to technology has never been better and because of that, they are being more productive and therefore they're being able to employ more and have high aspirations because of the markets being connected and so that's the widespread and very diverse transformation I see. So it looks like a significant opportunity for individuals for businesses and all industries I'm seeing that. Eric What you've doubled the amount of employees at Google the last since 2010 50,000 approximately now are we as an industry creating jobs or are we killing jobs faster than we are creating them? The question you're asking can be understood as how does the labor market change as a result of all this technology and let's pause it that the highly educated people who are driving this will all be fine in other words everybody in Davos and the Davos universe will be fine. What we're talking about is all the people who are dispossessed by technological change. Now this is not a new story it's been true for hundreds of years and there's no question there is dislocation. The core question is an economic one can you afford to stay behind in a technological or business opportunity or does it make sense or is it more efficient? All the laws of economics tell you that a globalized solution that is more efficient ultimately produces better wealth for everyone and you solve the problem of inequality which is a significant one through progressive tax policies and so forth again this is not news. So often the question is then asked well what happens to the person whose job is lost? Well it's the same thing that happened with other factors and so forth they find new skills and new services and so there's this enormous meme in the society where everyone assumes that this time it's different that somehow the work that all of us are doing and all the people in the room are doing is somehow no one's going to have a job in the world and it's just going to be the Davos elite and we're just going to have a good time and everyone else is going to be in rioting or some stereotype like that and it's just all false. The correct answer is that everyone gets smarter because of this technology because it's free or very inexpensive and the empowerment of people is the secret to technological progress over and over again it's been a transition from the elites remember the elites were the only people who could read now then everyone could read the elites were the only ones who were educated now everyone can be educated the elites were the only ones who had entertainment now everyone has education so we are all participating in this enormous transition where billions of people are joining our party joining our fun and joining our anxiety they're all getting the same knowledge and activities in education and if you get depressed talk to the people that Cheryl talked about or the people that I meet with for whom the arrival of the smartphone is the most important thing in their life perhaps besides that of a child that's literally how dramatic a life change is for them So you're saying that we've seen this kind of change before it's just a repeat I would challenge that in one sense that when we went from agriculture to industrial age it took one or two generations to get there and hence we had enough time to kind of adjust and with my experience in technology is driving change is at a very significant pace so can we keep up with that pace or is that a risk for this transition? Well first place there is no question the basis of your question is correct but things are happening more quickly but we're also a wealthier globe there are more people involved and so forth but let's use the self-driving car the original ideas were developed in the 1990s the first self-driving car won the challenge in 2004 they're just now technologies inspired from that 20 years ago are beginning to become in cars and most of you are not in those today it takes much longer for these technological things to occur than people think about So there is hope I have one concern though when you look at the world today and I'm coming back to my introduction that the world is under kind of one system there's no real tension anymore and we can globalize as much as possible technology is by definition global and yet I am seeing an increased tendency to regionalization even fragmentation special rules talk a little bit about that you took from an infrastructure point of view you're one of the most global providers of infrastructure you have a huge presence in India which is a very different market to the European markets you're in in Africa as well how is that evolving and can we avoid this fragmentation what do we need to do to avoid that we must avoid fragmentation the point fragmentation would actually if you go back to my movie thing you're going down frame by frame the movie and you don't want to slow down because as Eric said this is the greatest opportunity that we have to really improve living conditions everywhere resource management everywhere so we cannot allow fragmentation is fragmentation happening quite frankly there is a temptation and I think if I'm honest I think that we have very conflicting kind of feelings when we talk about privacy we think about something but then when something like Paris happens we think something else the whole issue of how we will manage the richness of data but also the potential dangers of data is clearly creating very very conflicting feelings in the population and therefore in policy makers we should absolutely avoid the fragmentation of this fantastic connectivity we are creating and I think you Satya mentioned it before that's where we need to try to find the right balance as you correctly said between different needs and not try to be too ideological but be very pragmatic we need to respect jurisdictions I'm not advocating for a second that jurisdictions should not be respected because jurisdictions exist there is a democracy in the world not everywhere unfortunately but most of the times but we should try to create harmonization in Europe there is a great opportunity because we have something called European Union that should harmonize and then between large blocks again we should harmonize because otherwise we slow down the movie and if we slow down the movie we take away a lot of the benefit from essentially the less fortunate also from us but also a little bit about what you've done in countries where let's say the cost barrier is a different one than what we are seeing in the more developed world how are you dealing with that listen I have a fantastic story about India in India there are areas where you look at all of your calculations your things and you say this is not economic and then guess what we are now finding out that whenever we put a new tower in a place within 8 months the amount of data 8 months not 8 years or 2 years the amount of data that goes through that tower is exactly the same of an area that before we have labeled as a good area why is that you wouldn't believe because people move from the edges of that area into the area in order to use data so we need to change a little bit the way we look at things change the equation that I have to deliver in order to bring something to the country now governments policy makers have to play ball because if of course they try to extract value the reason why I use with Merkel this digital plumber thing I prefer to call myself a digital plumber because yes there are people who build roads and highways but sometimes there are people who are against roads bring somebody in the world who is against water pipes we are life Eric you had a comment if I could just support Vittorio on this and I say this with almost complete seriousness almost all of the problems we debate can be solved by literally more broadband connectivity in these countries and the reason is that broadband is how you address the governance issues the information issues the education issues the personal security issues the human rights issues simple steps to make broadband occur it's not a new message in countries which are lagging are the key government and public policy thing that benefit the majority of the people I'm quite convinced if you have a government program to get broadband broadly available through partnerships with Vittorio and other kind of countries the citizens are clever enough as you showed in India and I have yet to find a country that doesn't have clever such people in it they're all clever enough just wire them up and the citizens will take care of a lot but you've also visited North Korea recently an unwired country and we do see some tendencies that with this availability of technology and access and information flow things seem uncontrollable and quite scary for some countries and they put different rules what does that do to this development the opportunity that we have at hand the internet is the greatest empowerment of citizens with respect to a government in many many years because all of a sudden the citizens have a voice they can be heard and we forget that millions of people live in countries where they have grievances or issues and we haven't heard them because there's no functioning press we can't talk to them we can't hear from them one of the greatest things about the internet is that they have serious concerns so in North Korea the numbers they're on the order of now 4 million internet connections but they're all through data phones and the data phones don't roam so it's not possible to connect from there outside the internet except through roughly 100 IP addresses internet use of the kind that we're used to is heavily supervised a simple rule is if you're a college student you have to use the internet with another college student who's watching you can use the internet on their own but you can assume there's computers watching what they're doing so it really is very much a surveillance of use and that's ultimately not good for the country and it's certainly not good for global safety but is there a risk that we get the fragmentation and what happens Satya you've been trying to penetrate some countries I heard a previous CEO from Microsoft say we have high penetration in China we're just not making any money how do you see that evolving and what are you doing to make technology let's say affordable to the billions of people if I sort of step back and think about from our perspective as the technology industry what are the three big issues that I think we need to tackle and we have to tackle with the regulators the governments and also amongst ourselves I would say there are three things one is a discussion we had around is the spoils of technology being evenly spread that's because of an issue that I think we have to tackle head on and we've got to be able to talk and Cheryl talked about the stories that really highlight that yes in fact technology can impact a lot of people and it's good for society overall but that narrative has to be broadly understood the second aspect is we've got to get this balance between privacy and at the same time use of data for legitimate public safety I don't think any of us can sit here and deny the use of data in order to be able to have governments protect us and then the last one I would say is this fragmentation issue internet is one of the most global goods and common good and if we destroy it we destroy a lot of our economic future but yet how do we get that balance where whatever is the cultural sensitivity, whatever is the local economic interest how do we get to that next level of sophistication where we really avoid the real nightmare scenario of the internet but yet we have to accommodate for these legitimate interests these are the three topics I think a forum like this can in fact facilitate great dialogue between all the constituents and we need a global consensus I don't think any set of us can make those rules nor can a single government make that rule because either one of those things will fail and that's where I think we have to put our minds and energy to stay with this challenge of the missing five billion people who don't have access we have two billion people online clearly a lot of disruption a lot of opportunity a lot of happy faces in what you can do Facebook as an organization from a business model point of view is really based on the amount of people that come together on your platform so you must be extremely interested in getting the remaining five billion people online we are and I think at its heart it's worth understanding that this is a cost problem so World Bank puts global poverty at $1.25 a day one in six people on the planet lives under that limit if you're a connected average Facebook user your implicit cost of data in the United States is $1 a day so that means the developed world is spending in data what the developing world lives on and so the only way we're going to make data accessible and unleash all the potential that everyone here talked about is if it gets cheaper and so everyone on the stage I think is working on it in their own way and there have to be lots of different approaches to connect 60% more of the world we have something a project we call internet.org which tries to provide free data in different places we've launched four apps and in about an hour we're launching our fifth in Ghana and what it does is it's an app that anyone can get that provides free Facebook, free messenger, free Wikipedia free access to UNICEF's Facts for Life to other health and mother motherhood based information civil rights for women pregnancy information advice on healthy children and what we've seen from our launches in other countries is that people have healthier babies because they can get basic information on what they should do during pregnancy or during early childcare and women understand what their rights are and they can look up information on Wikipedia this isn't the whole answer but it is a way of getting some people some data for free and we think that's really important and there have to be a whole number of other things but fundamentally the economics have to change to get the rest of the people online because as things are currently priced they can't afford it so who's paying for this? Vittoria are you gonna provide the infrastructure for that for free? I would like Cheryl to say if you're looking for the bandwidth or not because of course the concept is good the issue is who pays for the investment and for the spectrum and for the infrastructure that is required for that now if Facebook in its own generosity wants to donate part of your very large market cap into this this is great but that's your choice I am more a fan of finding structural ways not just commercial ways or promotional ways which are very noble I'm not saying they're not bad but they're not there to reduce the cost of providing data into those situations and therefore again examples like the one I made we really need to work on different models different we work a lot with the infrastructure manufacturers to reduce the cost of energy we reduce the cost of backup solar is becoming an important source in many countries to find ways also quite frankly to share this investment especially in rural or very poor areas like we do in India for example in order to make it sustainable in the long term free to me doesn't sound like sustainable in the long term Eric you have a rather big investments in balloons and infrastructure what's interesting is that when you study the poorest countries the most profitable industries in those companies often up to 10% of the GDP are in fact the telecommunications companies who are operating at very very low price points so we do have proof that in the traditional telephony not the smart phones there are entrepreneurs and companies that have been able to figure out Vittorio's model so I'm hopeful that we can do the same thing for Google's contribution we're working on a different technology to see if that works and it's balloons which float around and they literally float about 100 miles roughly 100 miles an hour sort of in the direction of the wind at that level and working with the local telecommunications provider they'll actually provide an LTE signal to a very remote person so a simple rule of how you get broadband everywhere which is sort of my underlying religion is your first choice would always be a fiber optic connection ideally directly to your home and in the advanced economies people have that your second choice would be using various forms of wireless because the government is busy selling that off to you and they shouldn't do that they should just give it to the telecom operators because it's such a public good and then the third would be using technologies for very rural areas to reach them satellite, balloons and others the combination of the some of them provides a communications web of enormous value to the world yeah I mean I think just adding on to Eric's piece but the thing that's fantastic is even amongst the panelists here there's absolute consensus that no cost bandwidth is a must for economic development to reach everyone in fact if you want to solve inequity issues and give opportunities to everyone let's start by getting that infrastructure and all of these various technologies I mean you talked about the balloons one of the technologies that we have been pioneering and there's no one solution here we would want all of these in fact to play in that roadmap you described and the technology that we are very interested in is white space how do we use the TV white space more effectively and in fact we've done a bunch of radio work to reduce the interference so that you can in fact in Ghana use TV white space we are partnering with the local ISP to provide a now a rural internet service the sustainability comes because now this local ISP has a low cost service that they are doing and to your point about having a model which is sustainable that's the way we are going to create markets for people to get access and so that's I think key to how we have to have innovation and then innovation needs to be brought to market and the regulators have to play a role the local entrepreneurs have to play a role and then at the end result is people with smartphones have great access to services and you should say by the way that the white space is the space between the channels that you never see that's right, Vittorio I would like to say a thing which will bring a bit of credit to about my joke about the generosity of Facebook we really have to be great for companies like the ones that are here because I have to tell you balloons if I'm honest I got the phone call from Google saying tomorrow morning we are announcing that we do the balloons and then my answer was my reply was Nikesh who was then working for Google what did you smoke? I mean balloons so here you're talking about the largest European or one of the largest in the world telecommunication company I really thought it was crazy believe it or not we are now working with them and we think they actually might work so back to this balance and this good cooperation between governments I think technology companies like these three are doing a lot of great things for the world we need to incorporate their ability to deploy and then my poor humble plumbing together with governments to let them understand what the opportunity is in front of us what nice hand this movie can have and this is the big challenge because of course you're talking about very complicated and you know your white space thing is just one example but it's great and it goes to where you started on the panel which is are you a pessimist or an optimist if you are an optimist in the technology industry or long optimist you believe that connectivity will give people voice that this will work out that we're going to try a lot of things and fail the technology industry is also one that's willing to try different approaches that don't work but that fundamentally we will succeed and people's lives will be better and I think we believe that and that doesn't mean there aren't challenges but there are also opportunities and I think the opportunity we all have working together in different ways and competing in other ways is to find ways for technology to make everyone's life better not just the people who are well educated and can code and I think that's a really important point when we think about what's happening in the global economy everyone's worried about jobs and they should be so much technological change your point that it's happening way faster when we talk about are happening faster than ever before all of that is true but at the same time technology creates jobs not just in the technological space but in the non-tech world so you know when I was in India these two women are fashion students at the Bangalore fashion design they started a company that makes hair accessories they make hair accessories and sell them through Facebook they employ three other women who were previously unemployed none of them are coding none of them have the education to code the women they employ don't have education at all really but they've created these hair accessory manufacturing jobs in Bangalore India because they can take advantage of technology and I think all of us are big believers in entrepreneurialism so think about what it used to take to start a business you have to get a storefront get a loan have an office or build a website which is expensive and now because of technology supplied by everyone on this stage as well as so many people in this room and at WEF you can do that with very low cost distribution, marketing, an ability to sell your products and services those costs are decreasing and that makes the ability to start companies and create jobs available to everyone just to support the numbers that all of our companies have lots of numbers which we can talk about about the scale of this there are many of estimates that each tech job generates five to seven non-tech jobs that come with it and we remember all those numbers we have all sorts of GDP growth that correlate these with higher GDP growth in countries there are estimates that if there were a single digital market in Europe which is a very high priority for all of us it would create up to four million new and important jobs in Europe but let's exploit this because there's no doubt that through the opportunity you all talk about and the acceleration that's happening we've seen tremendous value being created I compare that market cap of top 10 companies 10 years ago and now a lot of that value went to IT companies are we at a stage where if you're not an IT company there is no future and the second part of that question is this a winner takes it all kind of game because the nature of what you need to do in terms of technology and platform means that it can only be one otherwise it won't work how do you see that maybe Vittorio you start on that well you're really raising a question on possibility to continue to innovate if dominance is established these activities are intrinsically stronger if they have scale scale brings monopolies can we afford to have monopolies I would say no we shouldn't and I think dominance is another big issue that of the four I'm the one who probably doesn't have that problem but we have at some point to face now dominance is not necessarily bad so you could be a benign dominant player but I think if you go back to the point of who will be the judge who will decide that's another key point in the movie that at some point will have to be addressed and again I say it more in the sense of let's make sure that wrong decisions are avoided that in order to fix problems regulators or policy makers can overreact but I think that if you are a real entrepreneur to continue to innovate to continue to have the dream one day I will beat Google one day I will beat Facebook dominance should be taken out as a possibility so yes there will be also that angle of the story that has to be looked at. How do you see that I mean it's hard to have too many search engines in fact and yet there is a dominance challenge here how do you see that in the industry and I think the evidence is that the winners in every market will be the ones that use software and machine intelligence most effectively to solve customer problems better and I think you're going to see this you clearly see this in banking that's been true for a long time you see it in financial services for a long time but I think you're going to see it in many many other industries that have not yet seen the benefits of the much larger industry than what you think of as the IT industry it's all the people in these companies trying to make the delivery of trucks and goods and services and so forth better priced more efficient more individual and we haven't even talked about the scale of healthcare and that sort of thing so if you think of software the use of software which all of us try very hard to get into these companies in one way it is the transformation because it makes the company smarter the executive smarter the sales field smarter it allows you to manage your businesses more efficiently if you're not using it you're going to lose to somebody who is and that's sort of where we are and that's going to be true for another decade for sure maybe two on the question of dominance you now see so many strong tech platforms coming and you're seeing a reordering and a future reordering of dominance or leaders or whatever term you want to use because of the rise of the app on the smartphone and I think all bets are off at this point as to what the smart phone infrastructure is going to look like you have a whole new set of players who are taking this new platform which as I described is essentially you think of this as a phone but it's really a super computer and all of us spend a great deal of time thinking about what are the apps that people are going to use how are they going to solve the problem are we entering and I view that as a new platform at this point now the benefit of platforms if you turn around is that it fosters potentially an enormous ecosystem of others who don't have to build the fundamentals but can build on top of Microsoft has a strategy like that for many years how would that evolve will more innovation happen outside of the company I mean I think that the big advantage of platforms they are generative in nature in the sense that you create a platform so that others can in fact build on top of without having to bear the expense that they otherwise would have that leverage doesn't come without some scale and I think Vittorio talked eloquently about what it means to have checks and balances and dominance but technology evolution itself as Eric was saying can also take care of it as paradigm shift dominance position shift but the core thing that needs is needed in order for broad participation see one of the things for me is whenever I visit a country I make it a point to go visit the partners locally that are betting on our platform because to me that's life blood because our entire economic model is based on the ability to have lots of local partners who are doing things in health care or in banking or in energy sector on top of our platform and that's true for all of us in different forms and so as a platform provider you need to make sure that the economics of the platform are not all one sided and that there is enough out there to be able to create a generative platform otherwise I think it will collapse on its own sort of weight. I think one thing that underlies all of this which I know so many people here deeply care about is also equal access and opportunity so it's worth remembering that women are much less likely to be educated women are much less likely to get phones they are much less likely to be able to use their phones and actually the benefits of getting women connected often not always but often outweigh the benefits of men getting connected because they will put those investments back into the education and health care of their children so for example whenever we provide data making sure however we do it because there are a lot of different approaches here that we actually give information to women on what their rights are or how they get help for a sick child when you think about what's going to happen some of the evolutions Eric talked about all of this is only possible if we really make sure that women get access at the same rate as men and it's worth understanding that the world is not on that path 17 countries of hundreds are run by women 5% of the top jobs in almost any country in the world regardless of their legal structures around women and particularly as we look at basic education and access to data unless we intervene we means this community of everyone here women will not get the same opportunities to participate in these platforms participate in this growth as men and so it's something that I think takes an active and a different role than we've had before I think that is a splendid segue into taking a few questions from the audience the ecosystem of these leading technology companies with a very strong tendency for optimistic views and solutions to the challenges that we're facing please anyone there's a question down there and could I please ask you to present yourself and also direct your question to one of the panelists Stu Eisenstadt one thing that was not asked or addressed was the misuse of the internet by terrorist groups criminal gangs cyber attacks the ability of terrorist groups to organize and finance using the internet and then the governments demand which you've all faced in a way of combating that to try to get information from you that may compromise your own customers privacy could you discuss those range of issues and what are the challenges that we're facing and what are the challenges that we're facing Victoria? Yeah, you raise a point which is of course very true bad people use the internet not just good people and of course society needs to be sure that you can defend now the question is what is the appropriate what is appropriate and commensurate to the threat and again in the telecom sector we've been used to this since when I was young the issue is to have a very clear and I want to use the word transparent way of how you do it for example we were the first European operator publishing a transparency report in which we declare to our customers exactly what we do comma where we are authorized to describe what we do comma and where we are not we said why so I think transparency is very important there's no doubt that governments have the duty to protect their own citizens and there's no doubt that bad people are using the internet but it should not be a license to do everything because again there is a balance that has to be reached between the two different needs we have one more question there was one in the back as well red shirt hello my name is I'm a global shaper from Accra I used to work at Google too so it's really nice to see you Eric I'm also really proud that Cheryl mentioned the internet.org program happening in Ghana and I know about the kofoidia white spaces project as well I've used the internet a lot and I'm really championing the use of it in Ghana as well and I just wanted to pose a question to all of you around mobile internet around especially sub-Iran Africa so many people are using phones and I think the interesting thing is that there are a lot of people using the internet for Facebook and for a lot of communication especially in sub-Iran Africa where we are doing much more than just messaging but actual e-commerce running businesses of the internet what are some of the things that you can share to help us with that, thank you I think each of us can contribute a little bit to this the core problem in Africa has been its geographic bandwidth isolation for a long time there was only one cable on the left side of Africa now there are multiple cables and problems inside of Africa where the central countries think of them is like Uganda and so forth only had satellite access which is particularly slow and particularly expensive many many companies including those represented here have helped fund the necessary connectivity to get to the cities so a reasonable expectation is that if you're in one of the larger cities in Africa you will have reasonably good connectivity from the local providers including in many cases Vittorio's operations and I think that's a good start second problem has been language much of the content is not in the local languages and we have funded and others have funded projects to put that that's relatively straightforward once people get connected the third excuse me has been payment systems and I think if you look at the success of Mpesa in Kenya you mentioned some others there's a whole bunch of e-commerce and it sure looks like banking is going to be done over the internet so the combination of content and banking is probably enough at least in the cities to break the log jam thank you very much, we'll take one more question down here go ahead a colleague that I have from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology I'm just going to have a good question about the evolution of the internet we know that the internet started was just then we have we talked about the mobile internet where do you see the evolution of the internet especially in the context of 5G as we move forward I mean I think I can start and this is a topic that we can talk for a long time but one of the things that I do believe if you take even 5G in particular it's the adaptive way that we will use bandwidth I think that's perhaps one of the most breakthrough things that will happen for us as we sort of get very very comfortable with any given level of bandwidth we come up with ways to consume more and in fact one of the things technologies that I'm very very excited about is what does it mean to redefine even what mobility means and today's form factor of course is the phone and that's done a fantastic job of democratizing access and all the stories you heard today were about how it's really enabling all this inclusion what's the next metaphor or next paradigm that's in fact going to be more pervasive internet of things is what people talk about there's different type of battery needs different type of connectivity needs and that makes computing ubiquitous and intelligence ambient and so what is the evolution in the bandwidth and also the cost of bandwidth that allows us to truly get to ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is at least what I see is the future of the internet I would answer very simply that the internet will disappear the internet will be so many IP addresses because of IPv6 so many devices sensors, things that you're wearing things that you're interacting with that you won't even sense it it'll be part of your presence all the time imagine you walk into a room and the room is dynamic and you again with your permission and all of that you're interacting with a highly personalized highly interactive and very very interesting world emerges because of the disappearance of the internet if I may I completely agree with Eric to me the biggest question also in relation to the spectrum utilization the bigger question which I will leave it as a Davos question is will we really in the future continue to license spectrum do governments license no they tax the profit of us or the income of us human beings who breathe oxygen does it make sense will it be possible in a ultra dense connectivity situation to distinguish which spectrum is licensed which spectrum is not and who has the right to use what again question that probably I will not see because it's a very long but it's oxygen it's water it's this type of things so I think we are coming to an end of this it's clear that the internet will be like oxygen needed by everyone in order to come to a final close in terms of action would love to ask just a brief comment from every panelist as a closing remark what is the problem that your company will work most on and what do you need from someone else in order to accelerate us to that digital global future in one word in one word if you can trust re-establishing a positive constructive trust environment between technology providers governments plumbers and customers so that we are really defining in a harmonious way the next frames of the movie and I would say global consensus it cannot be left to any one company or any one government there needs to be a global consensus on re-establishing that trust Eric? I agree with that we need governments to do one very important thing which is to help build and license this infrastructure to make this incredible future happen as quickly as possible and Cheryl I would have loved a question from a woman but I will end with a voice of a woman inclusion inclusion an internet that connects everyone that's accessible to everyone and 30% of the internet today is in English if that does not make it clear how uninclusive it is right now nothing does we need voices technologists entrepreneurs of all types to reflect the diversity that is the world so that the voices can be heard and I think we can create a more connected and a safer world I think those are the best words we could end this session the last 25 years have created significant change I think today's panel talk about the next 25 years being even more significant but with an optimistic tone and I felt a strong commitment to make sure that that digital world can happen in a trusted global and inclusive way thank you very much