Info-telligence in the City

Big digital players, usually defined by a business model based on a big data platform that is able to aggregate and mine data, are positioned to profit from further value migrations also coming from the pandemics, if left unconstrained by local and global regulations that, however, all appear now more and more likely. For a start, they have certainly been greatly innovative and able to disrupt many status quo paradigms and capitalize on the dramatic surge of a knowledge economy where data and intelligence play a major role. These have also been creating the premises for a “winner-takes-it-all” competitive battlefield—a fierce arena of international and local competition where almost no one acts right now as a credible consumers’ advocate. To this end, there have been calls from policy makers, independent thinkers, and association—not only they are advocating “digital dividends”—basically an idea to tax big digital players not just because of their tax optimization techniques (being digital, they usually structure their taxable income across the most advantageous jurisdictions—thus arbitraging existing rules on a great scale). But also, they have called for swift anti-trust action because of their huge value accumulations and market capitalizations (measured in Trillions of USD, in fact) that are suggesting some abnormal renting position. A digital, tax-based dividend would provide a straight transfer of money to ensure some funding back to cities and citizens. Or new rules and regulations could just create stronger property rights that can allow a greater and more explicit monetization of data for the people, when they cede information and—indirectly—intelligence on their behavior, inner feelings, and even their biometrical or genome-related biological setup. The design of data-cooperatives acting as unions to get greater bargaining power and distributing more fairly the value generated (And the winner is 2020) is an idea that has been discussed in the past, but that is all but easy to execute at scale. The development of new laws and of independent parties able to provide some fair price estimates on data, based on scientific, objective, and verifiable “white box” modeling, could also be useful, but hardly able to steer any structural change on how data and info-telligence are used and monetized. A growing and changing role for the financial services sector could, as discussed later on, instead prove a more practical and interesting option to consider.