Entering the digital age

Former Swedish Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, has today written an interesting article about the new digital world in one of the leading Swedish newspapers. 

Bildt has as Head of the Global Commission on Governence Internet, just presented the ORCD report “One Internet”. 

Carl Bildt och OECD:s generalsekreterare José Ángel Gurría.

Here is a non-official translation of the article from todays’ Svenska Dagbladet:

‘Sweden presented in 1994 the first natuonal IT Commission Report called “wings to human ability”. Many experts and politicians were doubtful and wondered what we were actually doing. They claimed that Internet was a tool for experts, individuals and nerds, probably a trend that would pass, and hardly something that politics and public debate should deal seriously with. Such was the tone of many comments.

Carl Bildt, former Swedish PM and Minister of Foreign Affairs

But the Swedish IT Commission in 1994, was nationally and internationally groundbreaking. No other country had made any similar strategy at the time. And through deregulation and research efforts, Sweden was clearly in the starting blocks. GSM technology for mobile telephony had just made his entrance.

The historical Swedish 1994 Report on Internet

The Swedish IT Commission set up a long-term and ambitious goal: in 2010, Sweden would be in the international top level in the use of new information technology. It was not the technology that was the center of the work – it was instead the society’s use of the width of the technology.

Today this report from the IT Commission is a center piece of the Internet Museum in Stockholm, and my e-mail exchange with President Clinton as Prime Minister is displayed at the Newseum in Washington. And in many respects, developments since then actually overachieved the goals we set for more than two decades ago. But now we face a new and more pervasive stage.
Carl Bildt sent the first official e-mail between two national leaders when he e-mailed President Bill Clinton in 1994

Over the past two years I have led a broad independent international commission on Internet issues. We have listened and discussed in Stockholm, The Hague, Bangalore, London, Seoul, Ottawa, Accra, Palm Springs and Amman, and this week we present our report for the OECD in the debate Cancún.

I have said that we are entering in the fourth industrial revolution. I think there is more wrong than right. I think we are in fact at the beginning of the historical shift from the industrial to the digital age, and that this means a lot more than just another industrial transformation.

On sensationally short time the internet has become the major world infrastructure. And now the network faster than becoming the infrastructure of every other infrastructure in our communities’. 
Here is a link to the report “Global Commission on Governence Internet: One Internet” (click here): https://www.ourinternet.org/