What the e-G8 Could Mean for Internet Development
It's hard to fathom what the two-day e-G8 meeting in Paris, which starts tomorrow, will offer us. It's received only minimal coverage, despite the fact that the attendees include such high-profile people as Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and Jimmy Wales …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nicolas Sarkozy has convened a two-day 'e-G8' in Paris starting May 25, pulling Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and Jimmy Wales into a room with heads of state ahead of the G8 summit — and the framing has already caused friction, with Sarkozy riling Internet CEOs over his approach, according to FT Tech Hub. For the attendees the timing is pointed: Schmidt arrives days after handing Google's CEO job back to Larry Page and moving up to executive chairman.
The gathering also revives a European argument from four years earlier, when EU figures claimed Europe could lead web technology. What is new in 2011 is the format: rather than building companies, European leadership is being pursued by convening and regulating the American ones.
First-order effects
- Bezos, Schmidt and Wales are put on the spot publicly before national leaders on copyright, piracy and platform regulation, with Sarkozy's opening tone already having drawn visible pushback from the CEO contingent.
- For Sarkozy and the French hosts, the summit is a chance to attach European policy positions on the internet economy to the G8 communique that follows in Deauville.
Second-order effects
- Other governments get a template for summoning US platform chiefs to legitimacy-setting forums, turning attendance itself into a diplomatic concession executives must weigh.
- If the CEO backlash to Sarkozy's framing hardens, US internet companies have an incentive to coordinate positions on regulation collectively rather than country-by-country, shifting lobbying from Brussels-and-Washington silos to joint fronts.
Third-order effects
- The summit marks the moment internet governance stops being an engineering-community matter and becomes a head-of-state agenda item, setting up a structural contest between state regulation and platform self-rule that will define the sector's next decade.
- Europe's strategy of influence-through-convening, rather than through homegrown champions, risks entrenching the gap its own 2007 ambitions flagged — unless regulatory power becomes the substitute for market power.
The trend: Governments are inserting themselves directly between internet platforms and their users, using leader-level summits as the instrument of leverage over companies built without them.