Actually, during this whole event, during lunch, and during the radio interviews, I’ve been asking Saskia Sassen, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and everybody I met to put on this goggles and watch Earth with me together.
This is relevant because when we’re facing issues of a global scale, they enable us to think in ways that’s different from the ways that we used to think.
Yesterday, or really the day before yesterday, the French Assembly passed a very important law, the "République Numérique," the digital republic bill.
The bill works like an overview effect. On the Internet, when seen from the edges of the Internet, we see all the transnational issues. But when we are on the Internet, we keep the French values. We want to live as what the French people have always valued. In the cyberspace, as well as the physical space.
These values in the act, of course, includes the Internet’s primary virtue, that everybody can talk to everybody freely, that everybody has the equal access to Internet as a basic human right, and that whatever we put on the Internet should be secure, should be trustworthy, should not be surveilled, should not be tampered with.
These are just things valued in the real space and the same things we value in cyberspace, as well. When they talked about this bill, there were a very involved process of Internet consultation. This bill was done with a consultation with the Netizens, and everybody voted which act in this bill do they like, do they dislike, why, and they can propose new ideas.
One of the new ideas that came since the original draft of the bill, was that six months from now, the French government must write a report explaining to the Parliament, to the Assembly.
Whereas before, we had the Senate and the Assembly, now there’s also the Internet. The government sends all bills first to the Internet, after deliberation, and then to the Assembly.
Now, the challenge is to figure out how actually to implement this, and we have six months of time.
Now, in Taiwan, one year ago, we started a very similar thing, and I was a facilitator, moderator and architect of this system, which we call vTaiwan, which talk about more or less the same things as the Numérique République bills talked about.
But as we talk about these things more and more, we think that we discover many things that one nation cannot solve by its own, one place cannot solve by its own.
There are problems like Uber -- sorry -- challenges like Uber and AirBnB, which are of such a global scale that one sovereign entity is not sufficient to talk this problem through.
So we use the same Internet deliberation methods to talk about these transnational issues.
This slide is called "the day before yesterday", because it’s past midnight now. The day before yesterday, I was in the streets, and I saw the taxi driver on strike. They also waved this flag, says, "We want the same protections from our nation, but the government is not delivering it," and so on.
Then, the tricky thing is that last time when I was in Paris, and in June and August, there were exactly the same strikes. It has been going on for a couple years. [laughs] It’s not making visible progress. While the Netizens can deliberate very meaningfully on the digital republic issues, the Uber issue still puzzles the Parisians.
Now, when I talked to the drivers, and I did in the past few days -- both the Uber drivers and the taxi drivers -- they all tell me that the main problem was that they don’t think they have the same information the government is having. One driver told me that they think that the government is only talking to the lobbyists in the private sector.
Or if the civil society can enter it, it’s just through one or two committee members who does not really have a representative power to the rest of the civil society.
While the civil society has solidarity and it links itself together and so on, because it doesn’t have the same decision information that the government has, there is no trust between people with asymmetry of information.
How do we solve this problem? How can we feel the position of each other?