How Digital Public Infrastructure can unlock the trustworthy flow of data | World Economic Forum, Apr 28, 2023

"Digital public infrastructure (DPI) and data free flow with trust (DFFT) are two global priorities that are currently prominent on the agendas of India’s G20 Presidency and Japan’s G7 Presidency, respectively. ...Since its introduction during the Osaka G20, there have been some reservations on creating a global DFFT. We see four big challenges related to the push for DFFT: 1. Technical challenges: There are questions around how DFFT would be operationalized. For example, what data standards would be followed; how would the quality of data flows be verified and authenticated; how would consent be included; and how would interoperability be enabled, among others. 2. Privacy, security, trust and other safeguards: The crux of the debate for many developing countries is that there are broad differences among countries on how they approach privacy safeguards and the need for data security and sovereignty. Many countries are still coming up with their own privacy standards, without which a DFFT could risk the loss of security for their people. There are also questions around building trust between countries, ensuring reciprocity, and creating appropriate national and internal legal systems and frameworks to ensure DFFT is built safely. 3. Financing constraints: There is the question of how DFFT can be built sustainably. For countries, this would require drastic investments into their data collection and exchange systems. Yet the question remains: who would foot the bill? There are also open questions around how DFFT would compensate data owners vis-a-vis data users. 4. Digital divide: As mentioned above, several countries are concerned about the digital divide, given that a significant portion of their populations and economies exists offline. This will have implications on the amount and quality of their datasets, and, relatedly, their ability to transact on equitable terms with other countries that are more “data-rich”. Naturally, this would create new power dynamics globally...."