yes this week at the india house and the russia house and the local economy is also boosted by big bucks at hotels where if you can find a room it will cost you five hundred dollars at a minimum and at restaurants the cost of a steak meal with no frills can run you one hundred dollars this year has been especially transformative and not in a great way davos has experience more snow than any year since one thousand nine hundred ninety nine st snow blowers fill large truck which take and dump the snow outside of town as another truck quickly replaces the older one and while the removal process is a fish and all that snow has made the already small roads not much more than a single lane making traffic totally terrible that's even with hundreds of police officers from neighboring communities joining the security and traffic effort on tuesday for example it took the boom bust team two hours to travel only two blocks as a forum ends today many attendees will stay and ski over the weekend come monday residents

and businesses alike and davos will begin to get back to normal but they will do so with a little more money in their wallets and their bank accounts. as you know the world is becoming smaller and smaller every day one of the things that's helped us connect is the ability to talk to virtually anybody almost anywhere but the advancement of technology a person here in the u.s. could be skype they are on the face time with somebody in china in just a matter of seconds this team of global messaging has played a huge role at davos and bart managed to catch up with one man who knows a little bit about the subject check out. and we're back again and this time we are fortunate in actually honored to have philip metzger who is the director general of the federal communications office here in switzerland but more important than that he's also a global leader on technology and communication issues director general thank you

for being with us thanks very much for having me and in davos of course the conversations about what we do in the world and how does communications and digitization play into creating a less fractured world serve well of course that is that is the one million dollar question because on the one hand the communication per se we know that's that will be used to interact as human beings but on the other hand digitization is changing our entire lives how we work our we live how we play and so i think we have on the one hand the challenge of having a communication that reaches anyone and that we can have open channels of communication that we have certainly the freedom to express ourselves and on the other hand with the new digital potential that we have we have to make sure that we move forward into a digital world without leaving the people behind so incluse inclusiveness into is if it see it will be key and that requires i believe new forms of interaction as

well to reap the benefits of the just as a should and director general you certainly know about our reversal of net neutrality which for lack of a better phrase rations knowledge because it rations choice and information whether or not it's on the internet or on television but how do you balance as a regulator the free market and demands for open access eccentric at the same time privacy of individuals how to how do you walk that tightrope and i think that's of course a key aspect of how we make sure that going forward we keep the internet open and free and that people can use that tool not only just to communicate to interact but a. so to develop innovation and to develop and new services new goods and of course to allow for sustainable development which is our overall goal if you think about the twentieth erkki agenda and so i think that having said said that the question of neutral access of open access is key if i look at it from

a swiss perspective we certainly want to make sure that our networks are open that there is no restriction there is no blocking of content we are keeping a close eye on that we have good initiatives from the sector we have good business initiatives we have good interaction between the stakeholders because citizens are concerned about this is well but ultimately also need a number of number of rules without over regulating it because that can be counterproductive as well and so as we speak we're discussing in switzerland the revision of our telecoms act where we would like to in trying a number of rules regarding transparency so that the customer actually knows how his or her data is being treated and that they have a choice and i'm familiar i've been in this circumstance before where you know there is often times in overreaction to by politicians and i don't say that a negative way they are accountable to the people but legislators they want to do

something and it's really your job director general jobs like i had before where you have to say no let's make sure we do the commonsense approach and you go in and listen to people so that's a really a complicated balance to hold as we've talked about all of the other issues well of course i mean i'm speaking again from my own country you know our fundamental freedoms are key to us there in trying to our constitution the freedom of expression is an absolutely key tool for having the democracy that we have in switzerland the director more prosy work and so we certainly want to make sure we keep that openness having said that we are also aware and that's one other point we're going to try and change in that act that would the government. proposing a telecoms act to make sure precisely as you mentioned the child pornography that we can crack down on that more efficiently because there are a number of rules today and so it is a fine line as you said it is a fine line that we have to walk we want to be sure there is no overreaction but clearly there are fundamentals where days frankly a political consensus as well where we want to make sure that there are clear

limits and with regard to big data this term that's often thrown around where your phone companies can follow you around in your mobile device eccentric how are you balancing that freedom of big data and at the same time looking at scams and fraud internet crimes and well again i think for us to have that freedom and to preserve it is key we have a believe a constitution which allows for a lot of private initiative to come up with solutions that work that people are hearing to that they're also buying in a sense if you speak about business but on the other hand what we realize of course is that we also have clear maybe european views if you will when it comes to data privacy and they may be different from other continents i think we have a sort of a common understanding that we want to have a control over our own data as well and i think is that one of the major challenges

going forward big data and data per se is becoming an incredible resource and incredible. some people call it infrastructure rather would say it's like a raw material in any case it's something which allows us to progress a society the question is on the what conditions and the can and the question is for us also in switzerland is how can we provide for a framework which allows us to generate added value because what we see at the moment to be quite honest is that a lot of this value is being created elsewhere and here there are major corporations global corporations which are of course have had some plastic inventions that they're using though that they're promoting that their commercial. we have great infrastructures i.t. infrastructures in our country but i don't think today we are getting enough of the share that we would like to get from the potential of data so we will have to find there as well find the right balance between the data protection which is a key component in our culture again and i think in

a wide european context on the one hand but becoming better in trying to provide the right rules that allow businesses that allow a also the use for commercial purposes and i think the key component is to bring that together so they would be more tools for the individual to decide what he or she wants to do with his or her data and then enter into a kind of a transaction mode with business director general i travel a lot all over the world but i travel in rural america too and i can tell you in the states there are some places that you know it's not how much how many bars you have it's whether or not you have a bar whether or not there's even service there and it needs to be much better but i'm curious what's the circumstance you travel all over the world to what's the circumstance here in switzerland in the europe and in the world do they even have some of these internet or internet connections in some areas like sub-saharan africa etc well i think we have as i mentioned earlier we have i think we have

certainly for speaking for switzerland very good connectivity and the providers the telecom providers operators are investing to keep investing a lot in that both fixed and mobile but as you mentioned i mean if you look at the global scale if you look at this this issue there is clearly. something a risk in a sense that we get to a digital divide where we have people with access and we have others which don't and we know at the moment on the global scale it is not a really positive picture because too many people don't have access to the internet and again as important as the open internet the fundamental freedoms that can be expressed over the internet and unfettered. access is important of course is to get the physical infrastructure in place and there i believe technology helps us in the sense that we have a lot of mobile great mobile technology or satellite also that helps to leapfrog in a number of countries where they couldn't just deploy fixed wires in the ground and on the other hand we have to ask ourselves what policies and what regulations are

actually conducive to investments we are right now working in the within the broadband commission for sustainable development to which i am a member on a set of policy recommendations which should be you know be looked into by decision makers when they decide what kind of rules they set because they can greatly influence the will and the willingness of of operators of investors to come to those countries who desperately need the access so i think it is a fundamental point if we don't crack the question of the digital divide we will have major major issues and we will leave the vast vast populations across the globe in a situation that they are not supposed to be that they deserve to be much better much better connectivity and so i think that's that's ultimately what we're here for director general of philip metzger we thank you so much for your time for your

dedication to public service and for being a global citizen and helping to work on these issues all over the world thank you so much for your time is an honor to be with you thank you. all right that does it for me here in washington today but be sure to join us next week we'll have a ton more stuff that we didn't get to share this week in davos bartleby back with us here in studio next week thanks for watching i'm going to hand a let's check out now with art over in davos that's all for now it's been an interesting and really fun week actually and we hope all of you got a full flavor of what's been going on here at the world economic forum in davos switzerland you can check out boom bust you tube you tube dot com slash boom bust r t so long now from switzerland see you next week from washington.

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