Re: Welcome / introductions

> Il 24/11/2021 06:49 Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> ha scritto:
> 
>  
> Hello everyone. Welcome to the Community Group!
> 
> We're just getting started, so please excuse the quiet while we wait for people to join and allow the Americans their holiday. I'm aiming to hold an online meeting before the end of the year, so that we can start discussing how the group will function and what we want to focus on first. 
> 
> However, it'd first be good to get to know each other.  Please send an e-mail introducing yourself, including:
> 
> * A brief summary of your background
> * Why you're participating in this group
> * Where you call home (so we can try to schedule meetings when it's not *too* painful for anyone)

My name is Vittorio Bertola and I am based in Turin, Italy.

I am an engineer and have been developing websites and Internet stuff since the mid 90's, including founding a few startups and sometimes getting involved in the development of new standards and technologies. I also started my activism in the Internet governance sphere at the end of the 90's. I was one of those who campaigned for Internet user representation within the newly formed ICANN, where in 2002 I became the first Chairman of the At-Large Advisory Committee, and later the At Large liaison to the ICANN Board. I was also a member of the U.N. Working Group on Internet Governance, which invented the Internet Governance Forum. I've been involved in Internet governance venues since then, and currently serve on the ICANN Nomcom and on the Board of ISOC Italy.

I am currently the head of policy at Open-Xchange, a German mid-size open source software and service company which makes a few widely used free software server applications (Dovecot, PowerDNS) and also provides webmail, collaboration and DNS platforms to several big ISPs around the globe. We believe in open source and in the original Internet architecture based on open standards and distributed, federated services, so we put energies into promoting open alternatives to the walled gardens of the dominant Internet platforms, both through technical innovation (e.g. the ID4me project for federated single sign-on, which I currently chair) and through policy and regulation. 

I am deeply involved in the discussions around current European platform regulation attempts, where we joined forces with well known NGOs and promoted a company coalition (the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets) that is pushing for mandatory interoperability requirements for platform services. I'd say we're having some success, since the version of the text approved Monday night by the competent committee of the European Parliament includes them for ancillary services (payment, identification...), for instant messaging and for social media.

There clearly is the need for the industry to provide the technical implementation for the rules that are adopted by the various jurisdictions. While Europe has its own SDOs and standards recognition processes, so it's not a given that anything the W3C or the IETF produces will automatically be accepted, it's better if we as a community work to provide good technical solutions to the policy objectives set by Parliaments and governments, because if we don't, someone else will force bad technical solutions onto us. We've seen this happen multiple times in the last 25 years, so I welcome any work that might prevent this from happening.

-- 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

Received on Wednesday, 24 November 2021 11:49:33 UTC