“The multilateral world that we know dates from an analog era, we have to imagine the future.” Former Federal Councilor Doris Leuthard presented the foundation she chairs, Swiss Digital Initiative (SDI), on the sidelines of the WEF. This new player aims to improve ethics and security on the web. Large Swiss and international groups are part of the adventure, from Microsoft to Huawei via Credit Suisse but also universities.
The young foundation started in September 2019, but it is gaining in density. Tuesday evening, two federal advisers (Ignazio Cassis and Ueli Maurer), bosses of big companies and many diplomats had answered present. Yves Flückiger, rector of the University of Geneva, said that his teams quickly mobilized for this project, “a sign that he is at the heart of the challenges of technology development”. The Swiss Digital Initiative wants to create standards in the area of digital trust. And if the initiative could seem like “one among others” at the start, it is maturing, as noted Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, partner since the beginning of the initiative.
200 criteria
“There are a lot of questions that arise but we are moving very quickly,” explains Marc Walder, founder of Digital Switzerland on the initiative of SDI and also president of Time. We now have more than 200 criteria in catalog to analyze the quality of service of a supplier and we must now go beyond the exploration phase. “
Pioneers were presented: companies that will go through the SDI criteria grid in the spring, namely Booking.com and Credit Suisse. “We are still in the Wild West, in any other industry consumers would not accept non-certified products,” said Martin Vetterli, President of EPFL. And Switzerland is the ideal place to achieve this certification. ”
Towards a Swiss standard
The foundation – which currently works only on the goodwill of its members – must work with companies who wish and dare to play the game in the field of digital security. In the longer term, SDI wishes to link up with Gesda, the foundation created by Patrick Aebischer – ex-president of EPFL – and Peter Brabeck, former president of Nestlé. The goal is to define a Swiss standard and then export it.
Funding for SDI could come from the Confederation, from the canton of Geneva, which is the natural place with the presence of international organizations to host the project, but also from private individuals or foundations. For Peter Brabeck, it is urgent. The latter recently participated in a panel in Hong Kong with the humanoid robot Sofia: “There is no multilateral institution that takes into account such changes induced by digitalization”.
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