European Chapters Meeting Report

Our Vice-Chairman external, Richard Hill, attended the 2017 European Chapters meeting, 22-23 February, 2017, in Amsterdam. Twenty-four chapters attended the meeting.

The presentations, meeting notes, videos, and photos are posted here.

Richard made the presentation regarding the ISOC Global Internet Report
2016: The Economics of Building Trust Online: Preventing Data Breaches

The key points presented by Richard were:

• methodology of the report;
• users are increasingly concerned about data breaches;
• the costs of breaches are not borne by those who should protect the data:
  there are externalities;
• users cannot readily determine which organizations have better security
  measures: there is information asymmetry;
• there is a need to increase transparency (e.g. mandatory reporting of
  breaches); to increase the priority given to the problem; to increase
  accountability (e.g. an organization with inadequate security measures
  should bear the full costs of a breach); and to increase incentives for
  improved security; and
• inadequately secured IoT devices present an increasing risk that should be
  addressed.

See the Internet Society page here for more info.

Key topics discussed at the European Chapters Meeting were:

• Introduction to trust, based on 2016 ISOC report
• Editorial responsibility for online content – platform neutrality,
  recommender systems and the problem of ‘fake news’
• Future Internet Scenarios
• Collaborative security introduction
• User-Trust, with regard to longevity and security of IoT devices
• Search ranking technologies
• ISOC-NL initiative to provide a comprehensive set of tools (e.g. document
  sharing, remote meeting, etc.) for chapters, based on open source systems

Regarding “fake news”, there was general agreement that any attempts to block or categorize information could lead to censorship, so the best approach is to ensure that correct news is available and that users know that they need to evaluate themselves the accuracy and reliability of information published on the Internet.

ISOC-CH thanks Richard for his time and representation at the meeting and would like to thank the hosts and organizers for a terrific event.