January 13, 2021 – London, UK. Access Partnership, the global public policy consultancy, today released its Tech Policy Trends in 2021. Following the accurate predictions of their previous Trends publications, the 2021 report focusses on issues germane to the moment, including protecting an open Internet, competition with China, COVID-19’s acceleration of digital transformation, and optimizing data governance, security and privacy.
“2020 re-confirmed that the tech sector can drive solutions to monumental problems.” said Access Partnership’s Managing Director, Greg Francis. “And what happened in Washington, DC last week will only accelerate calls for these companies to do more: to meet social justice expectations of employees, investors, and customers, deliver innovations that decarbonize the economy, and even turn away from revenue opportunities if they conflict with these imperatives.”
The ten topics framed in Access Partnership’s Tech Policy Trends in 2021 include:
- COVID-19’s effects on accelerating digital transformation across industries
- Rapid and sustained innovation that drives climate action to achieve net zero emissions
- Testing social justice commitments for sincerity
- Collaboration and leveraging multilateralism to address the China challenge
- Frictionless data storage
- Shaping competition processes as global antitrust takes center stage
- Shifting the intermediary liability regime through the Digital Services Act and Section 230
- Regulators eye e-commerce giants, as they extend their reach into more markets
- OpenRAN goes mainstream with the rollout of 5G
- Network virtualization’s scalability drives a new era of telecom frameworks
“2021 will see the start of a sustained effort to regulate tech companies more, such that the question is not if, but how that process will affect businesses and citizens,” said Francis. “This needs to tread a line between protecting competition and increasing consumer choice, while driving more intergovernmental cooperation to ensure people can use tech solutions when they need them, worldwide.”
The complete report Tech Policy Trends 2021 is available online here.
For more information on Access Partnership or on the study, please contact Ivan Ivanov, Senior Marketing and Communications Manager at ivan.ivanov@accesspartnership.com.
