What is new in Davos for Telefonica?

The World Economic Forum was created over four decades ago as an informal non-profit institution with the mission of “improving the state of the world”.

To accomplish such an overwhelming mission, every year global leaders from governments, the business community and civil society gather for a week in Davos-Klosters to identify specific areas of public-private collaboration that can contribute to move ahead in crucial issues for the future of humankind. These issues tackle diverse and profound themes such as deepening income inequality, increasing water stress, the weakening of representative democracy, persistent jobless growth or the lack of leadership in our society.

To define the main themes of Davos each year, the World Economic Forum produces annually a global agenda of key challenges that global leaders will have to face in the coming 12 months. The role of Information and Communication Technologies as tools to address many of these challenges has regularly been included in this agenda. This is the reason why Telefónica has been deeply involved with the Forum and participates regularly in the Davos meetings.

This year however there is an additional reason why Telefónica is participating in the Davos meetings: the agenda has incorporated for the first time a groundbreaking subject that is on the top list of the interests of our company: the future of the internet and more specifically, the institutional challenges of internet governance.

Rick Samans, Head of the Centre of the Global Agenda and Member of the Managing board at the World Economic Forum stressed this novelty of the Forum’s agenda in the public presentation of Davos a couple of months ago.   Samans stressed the need to advance through public-private dialogue in challenging aspects of the internet such as fragmentation, privacy and security and in the main question underlying these issues: who should be responsible for protecting the internet itself?

To answer this, the WEF launched today in Davos “The Future of the Internet Initiative”, an informal, integrated platform for leader-level dialogue and cooperation on a wide range of key challenges related to the future of the Internet.

Telefónica has a lot to say in this platform and we plan to participate actively, with the assistance of our Public affairs and Internet team. We will keep you posted!