Room S4
The impact of the Internet is growing in breadth and depth, fostering innovative new companies, transforming traditional industries, reshaping government interactions, and increasing opportunities for social inclusion. The growth of the Internet has been enabled by the economics of the Internet; services are often free, usage at work, home, and public hotspots is often not metered, and the standards are open for anyone to develop new services, applications, and devices. These characteristics, in turn, fuel the growth of large platforms that have generated concerns recently about privacy and data protection, content availability, and market power that are leading new calls for governance. The workshop will introduce the economics of the Internet, the resulting issues behind the recent ‘techlash’, and evaluate policies that are being discussed to address the concerns.
Michael Kende is a Senior Advisor at Analysys Mason, a senior advisor to the World Bank, and has been teaching a course on Internet Economics at the Graduate Institute for the past four years. Most recently, he was the Chief Economist of the Internet Society. Prior to joining the Internet Society in August 2013, Michael Kende was a partner at Analysys Mason, a global consulting firm focused on telecommunications and media. He was head of the Policy and Regulatory sector, head of the U.S. office, and most recently was in charge of developing its Internet practice at Analysys Mason. He has done a significant amount of work on promoting Internet development in emerging regions around the world. He is also working on the economics of cybersecurity, as a means to reduce data breaches and increase trust in the Internet. He has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and after MIT, he spent five years as a professor of Economics at INSEAD. He was also the Director of Internet Policy Analysis at the US Federal Communications Commission, where he was responsible for managing a wide range of policy analyses and regulatory decisions.