Thomas Jarzombek, Federal Government Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Start-ups, called for the official start of the 15. Internet Governance Forum of the United Nations (UN) a coordinated action against the monopolies of the big platforms. With this initiative, the federal government wants to oppose the fragmentation of the Internet. The taxation of the Covid winners Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft demanded US economist Jeffry Sachs in the unusually sharp exchange of blows for the UN forum.

Gatekeeper Facebooks and WhatsApps free offers are no solution for the still existing problem of the lack of universal access to the Internet, said Jarzombek. “It’s more part of the problem,” he countered the portrayal of Whatsapp’s Vice President Victoria Grand. “We pay with our data, and that is a high price.”

A competition policy that is as globally coordinated as possible, the “commercial Internet” also for new ones Open player, according to Jarzombek, is one of the points that the federal government would like to advance the IGF. 100 The federal government will invest millions of dollars over the next three years in the work of the IGF, which has had more of an eye on German politics since it was in last year host of the 14. Edition was.

Taxation and obligations The former Swiss President, Doris Leuthard, also underlined the need for a discussion about the big monopolies: “There are a handful of companies that make a lot of money with our data.” That should be on the political agenda. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has already put proposals for a taxation of the large Internet companies on the table.

Before that, the US economist Sachs had the big-tech entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg , Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates called on to use their immense fortune to create universal Internet access. Sachs called for all schools to be connected within a year. The international community had actually already set itself this goal for 2015, reminded the Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the heated debate.

“Four people in the US are 540 billion US dollars,” ranted Sachs. In the coronavirus year 2020 these four would have even increased their wealth by 204 billions. “I would like to hear from Mark Zuckerberg what Facebook is doing, what he is doing with his personal wealth to achieve universal access?” Sachs asked the WhatsApp representative Grand who was represented in the group.

Gathering the pace The US under Joe Biden, said Sachs, will hopefully take on its responsibility on the question of taxation and competition policy towards the big players again . In view of the billions in profits of the big platforms in the year 2020 it is hardly justifiable to aim for a connection for everyone up to 2030, says Sachs.

Aiyas Sayed-Khaiyoum, the Minister for Economic Affairs and Attorney General of the island state of Fiji, reported how quickly universal connection projects can be implemented. Within the past five years, with the support of the World Bank, the country has had access to the network of 60 percent of the archipelago on 95 elevated. Now they want to do the hard “last mile” of five percent.

Encryption bans dangerous Grand countered the allegations against their boss Zuckerberg with the reference to the fact that Whatsapp and Facebook have enabled millions of small and micro-enterprises to move their business into the net. Whatsapp and other platforms have also taken care of the increasing security through encryption. From their point of view, the currently launched initiatives to ban or weaken encryption are all the more worrying.

The completely virtual IGF 2020 runs until next Monday.

(kbe)