PANEL: ASIA’S COMING TECH-LASH?
Big tech now dominates lists of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalisation. American firms such as Google and Facebook dominate the West, while Chinese ones like Tencent and Alibaba are buying up or investing in South-East Asian players. Latin America, Africa and India are still up for grabs. The world’s largest economies are using different models to govern the use of data, and these often reflect their core political and economic principles. Angela Merkel, in a September 2018 article in The Economist, said that “in the US, control over personal data is privatised to a large extent. In China, the opposite is true: the state has mounted a takeover.” In this view, the European Union is taking the middle road by adopting a model led by government but focused on protecting individuals.If countries are to create systems that work, there needs to be robust discussion of the available models’ merits. What are the limits to growth under each approach? How will their outcomes affect geopolitical developments, especially as China continues to rise? How will these models be applied in other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore? And how will emerging large economies, such as India, develop their own approaches? And as Asian businesses and governments make extensive use of data, is there the risk on an eventual consumer and voter backlash, as we have seen in the West?
Speakers:
- K.F. Wong, director, centre for innovation and technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
-Jeongmin Seong, senior fellow, McKinsey Global Institute
- Makoto Shibata, head, Finolab
Moderator:
Tom Standage, deputy editor, The Economist
PANEL: ASIA’S COMING TECH-LASH?
Big tech now dominates lists of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalisation. American firms such as Google and Facebook dominate the West, while Chinese ones like Tencent and Alibaba are buying up or investing in South-East Asian players. Latin America, Africa and India are still up for grabs. The world’s largest economies are using different models to govern the use of data, and these often reflect their core political and economic principles. Angela Merkel, in a September 2018 article in The Economist, said that “in the US, control over personal data is privatised to a large extent. In China, the opposite is true: the state has mounted a takeover.” In this view, the European Union is taking the middle road by adopting a model led by government but focused on protecting individuals.If countries are to create systems that work, there needs to be robust discussion of the available models’ merits. What are the limits to growth under each approach? How will their outcomes affect geopolitical developments, especially as China continues to rise? How will these models be applied in other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore? And how will emerging large economies, such as India, develop their own approaches? And as Asian businesses and governments make extensive use of data, is there the risk on an eventual consumer and voter backlash, as we have seen in the West?
Speakers:
- K.F. Wong, director, centre for innovation and technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
-Jeongmin Seong, senior fellow, McKinsey Global Institute
- Makoto Shibata, head, Finolab
Moderator:
Tom Standage, deputy editor, The Economist