Mr. Jim Balsillie:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present to it today. The committee's leadership on issues related to data governance inspires many well beyond Ireland's borders. I am the retired chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion, a mobile data services firm we scaled from an idea to $20 billion in sales. My expertise is the commercialisation of technology, specifically for multi-sided platform business model strategies and their network effects.

In the attached appendix, I list the six recommendations I made at the IGC meeting in Ottawa in May. Today, I will explain three foundational elements that underpin all of my recommendations because a stable, long-term solution to the current challenges lies in confronting them systemically.

The current business model is the root cause of the problems the committee is trying to address. Its toxicity is unrelenting. It is not a coding glitch that a legal patch will fix. Data at the micro-personal level gives technology unprecedented power and that is why data is not the new oil. It is the new plutonium - amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used. A business model that makes manipulation profitable is a foundational threat to markets and democracy. Democracy and markets only work when people can make free choices aligned with their interests, yet companies that monetise personal data are incentivised by and profit from undermining personal autonomy. Whistleblowers inside platform companies told us that "the dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will." That is why we need to outlaw the current business model and reintroduce responsible monetisation, such as subscription-based models. Strategic regulations are needed to cut off the head of this snake. Anything less means governments will be perpetually coping with its slithery consequences turning policymaking into a losing game of regulatory whack-a-mole.

Silicon Valley’s business plans are not political programmes. The contemporary technology sector is an industry that celebrates engineering as an alternative form of governance. It distrusts the political process and disregards the public interest. Its concentration of power is owed to the features of the modern knowledge-based and data-driven economy that tip markets through its steep economies of scale, powerful economies of scope, pervasive information asymmetry and network externalities. Technology is not governance; it must be governed. The choice we face in 2019 is not between Facebook and China, which paradoxically borrow from each other the tools and tactics that encode their grip on power. The option we face is either a social choice mediated by democracy or social outcomes engineered by unbridled, unethical and unaccountable power.

A global digital stability board is needed to institutionalise co-ordinated responses and underwrite a progressive digital future. Cyberspace knows no natural border. The Cambridge Analytica scandal involved Canadian technology on a US platform paid for by Russian and US money to interfere in a British referendum over its future in the European Union. The business model that enabled this, nourished by discredited neoliberal policies, turns customers into products. If left unaddressed, it will render liberal democracy and free markets obsolete. The timing is urgent. In North America, record-setting lobbying expenditures by data-driven platforms resulted in chapter 19 of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which includes provisions that lock in the current advertising-driven business model and prevent lawmaker oversight of algorithms. The current US Administration is working to entrench these rules globally through the World Trade Organization negotiations on the trade-related aspects of e-commerce.

We have arrived at a new Bretton Woods moment where new or reformed rules of the road at the international level are needed. They should be rules that preserve an open global trading system yet, at the same time, respect a nation’s sovereign ability to regulate the data-driven economy's profound cross-cutting economic, security and social effects. I have proposed the creation of an organisation that would be akin to the Financial Stability Board that was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Industry can be part of the solution by acknowledging the toxicity of the current business model and migrating to responsible revenue generation for services.