NGI Interim Study Report on analysing stakeholder input found Safeguarding Openness to new Entrants to be an essential feature of future human-centric sustainable Internet. The following 4 aspects of safeguarding openness were identified.
- Unlocking New Verticals: Countermeasures are required in NGI against market dominance and lack of choice and control in application domains critical to the users. One of the ways it can be achieved is through suitable microscale alternatives based on open source, open standards, thus dissolving the dependency on hyperscale giants.
- Preventing Horizontal Spillover: For reducing the dominance and near complete dependency, take-over of strategic markets by dominant players from related fields should be avoided in NGI.
- Improving low-level discovery: Unbiased and unmediated search, and direct discoverability of services and content offered should be provided for where possible.
- End-user capabilities with open spectrum (specific to 5G): Adequate end-user controlled radio spectrum should be made available as it allows for grass roots innovation.
Openness to new entrants in NGI can be enabled by making it simpler to create services and by unlocking dominant positions in application domains strategically important to the users, which is hampering development and innovation. Freedom of use is ensured by mechanisms supporting open access, such as stimulating the offering of scalable shared mechanisms to support multi-cultural needs, like multilingual use and local content i.e. availability of ICT in every language – driven by the needs of the language communities rather than business decisions. The strict enforcement of Net-Neutrality must be the legal requirements which means that no type of internet usage shall be discriminated against by access providers. This openness drives sustainability of the NGI while enabling diverse creativity and innovation.
