Public Policy Blog

Next week, from 27 February to 29 February, the GSMA will host more than 140 delegations from governments and international organisations at the Ministerial Programme, part of Mobile World Congress 2012. Now in its eighth year, the Ministerial Programme aims to provide a platform for high-level dialogue between governments, regulators and the leaders of the [...]

Many are the predictions those days in the Net concerning our sector and its perspectives for 2012, from how the telecom sector will evolve, to which services and technological trends will be the winners for next year, or how social networks will be positioned, what will be the IT “super themes” for 2012, etc…
This is a difficult and somersault exercise in a very dynamic and evolving sector such as the ICT & Telecom one. However, it is sure that some trends could be already detected.

Concerning the ICT public policy area, we could see the following issues as relevant as they are present in several international and public institutions agendas for 2012. Here are some of them:

Telefónica has been chosen by the OECD to represent the business sector at a workshop on December 7 on “Financing R&D&Innovation in the Current Macroeconomic Context” held at the OECD headquarters. Here are some ideas…

Good news for CSR! On 25th October, the European Commission published “A renewed EU strategy 2011-14 for Corporate Social Responsibility”. The communication presents the concerns of CSR, an evaluation of the impact of European policy on CSR, a modern understanding of CSR – including an updated definition- and a new agenda for action 2011-2014. But [...]

As you all know, we attended the OECD High Level meeting on the Internet economy, where so many distinguished speakers contributed to the event. There were Ministers, officials, policy makers, industry leaders and Internet evangelists but also civil society and technical communities. Around 400 people attended the meeting, focused on 5 main topics such as broadband access, the role of broadband and innovation in the social and economic growth, balancing policy goals to strengthen growth and finally policy-making principles for an open Internet.

Last week I attended the 11th Corporate Responsibility Roundtable of the OECD, which was devoted to the implementation of the OECD Guidelines for MNEs 2011. I believe that these guidelines set up an effective mechanism to monitor compliance with them across all OECD member states and will be an effective tool to achieve an improved [...]

As I announced in a previous post, the other relevant event taking also place in Paris this week is the OECD 50th Anniversary.