Opening address to the 7th REFRAM Presidents' Conference by Roch-Olivier Maistre, President of Arcom

Opening of the 7th REFRAM Presidents' Conference
Thursday, October 6, 2022 - 10:15 am (UNESCO House)

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Thank you once again, Madam Director-General, dear Audrey Azoulay, for your words and your welcome. As I said, it is an honor and a pleasure for us to be holding our 7th Conference of REFRAM Presidents at UNESCO House, whose current work is in line with our reflections and the theme of this conference. In this respect, I would like to assure you of the full commitment of the network's members to working hand in hand with you to help build a safer and more inclusive online environment.

I would also like to thank the representative of the Secretary General of La Francophonie, Henri Monceau, for being with us today. The Francophonie and its values are of course very dear to the members of REFRAM, and your intervention on behalf of the Secretary General is an appreciated mark of support from an institutional network of the Francophonie.

Thank you, of course, to all of you, presidents, members and collaborators of REFRAM member authorities, for your presence in Paris, at the end of a journey that I know is sometimes long.

Finally, I would like to thank the President of REFRAM, dear Nouri Lajmi, for carrying the torch so high during these special years. I will have the opportunity (and we will all have the opportunity) to thank you at greater length tomorrow, but I would like to remind you of your commitment to advancing the work of REFRAM, maintaining dialogue between members and courageously upholding the values of our network.

1. We wanted the theme of the 7th REFRAM Presidents' Conference to be the adaptation of regulation to the challenges raised by online platforms.

This conference comes at a singular and important time for our respective institutions, given the unavoidable role now played by online content platforms in our societies. We are well aware of the importance of the challenges raised by online content platforms in terms of sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights. Various discussions are currently underway on this subject at global level. Among these, the response initiated at European Union level, with the recent adoption of the European Digital Services Regulation (the DSA), appears to be of particular importance. For the first time, a major regional grouping has adopted a restrictive legal instrument for the effective regulation of online content, protecting democratic schemes and the fundamental rights of users, while guaranteeing "one of the most precious human rights": freedom of expression. Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, has done us the honor of sending us a message for our conference, and I'd like to thank him warmly for that.

One of the main themes of the conference, and of the forthcoming REFRAM presidency which I will have the honor of chairing, will be to reflect on the extent to which the new regulatory models that are being put in place, and the regulatory tools and methods associated with them, could be a source of inspiration for large regional groups, French-speaking states and regulators.

2. The four thematic sessions of this Presidents' Conference will be devoted to the regulation of digital platforms:

The "major challenges" session, which will open after Thierry Breton's message, will enable "major witnesses" to set the terms of the debate by highlighting and illustrating the major challenges raised by online platforms in terms of sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Célia Zolynski, University Professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne, Fabrice Fries, Chairman and CEO of Agence France Presse, and Gilles Babinet, Chairman of the Conseil National du Numérique, for their presence and participation.

The "network experience" session, which will open the afternoon's proceedings, will provide an opportunity to present the thinking and work of networks of friendly regulators, including

• the Réseau des instances africaines de régulation de la communication (RIARC), chaired by our friend and President of Morocco's HACA, Latifa Akharbach, who has just successfully held her 10th conference in Marrakech;
• the Plateforme des régulateurs de l'audiovisuel des pays membres de l'UEMOA et de la Guinée, chaired by our friend and President of Senegal's CNRA, Babacar Diagne ;
• and the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), chaired by our friend and President of the French Superior Audiovisual Council of Belgium, Karim Ibourki.

This session is of particular importance to me, insofar as I want to make cooperation between networks of regulators, particularly in the field of online content regulation, one of the main themes of the next two years.

And I'm not forgetting the "newcomer" among the networks, namely the Platform of audiovisuel and communication regulators from Central African States, chaired by our Cameroonian counterpart, Mr. Joseph Chebongkeng Kalabubsu, whom I'm delighted to have with us today. I hope, Mr. Chairman, that our networks will have the opportunity to cooperate together over the next two years and beyond.

The "country experience" session will then provide an opportunity to present developments or planned developments in the legislative framework for regulation in various countries, as well as new tools put in place to regulate online content platforms. On this occasion, we will benefit from a presentation of the latest developments in Canadian legislation by Ms. Alicia Barin, acting vice-president of the Canadian CRTC, and from the exceptional participation of our friend Tobias Schmid, commissioner for European affairs at the Conference of Directors of German Media Authorities (DLM), who will be kind enough to present a tool for analyzing online content based on artificial intelligence, which has been developed within his authority.

For my part, I'll be taking the opportunity to present the new missions of Arcom, which, as you know, was created on January 1 from the merger between the French Superior Audiovisual Council and Hadopi (the supreme authority for the distribution and protection of intellectual property on the internet).

A "dialogue with platforms" session tomorrow will give the floor to representatives of three major digital platforms (Meta, Twitter and Google) on online content regulation, as part of a dialogue with REFRAM members. Digital ambassador Henri Verdier will do us the honor of taking part in this round-table discussion.

At the 39th session of the Ministerial Conference of the Francophonie on December 10, 2021, the Strategy of the Digital Francophonie set itself the objectives of (and I quote) " developing a digital space that fosters cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as accelerating digital transformation in the service of strengthening democracy and human rights, supported by reliable, quality information, protected from information manipulation and misinformation, online hatred and discrimination in all its forms ". I think I can say on behalf of us all that REFRAM fully subscribes to these objectives.

In the run-up to the next Francophonie Summit, REFRAM should make its voice heard and invite the member states of the Francophonie to affirm their shared determination to adapt audiovisual regulation in the French-speaking world to the challenges raised by online platforms.

This objective also implies that we affirm the readiness of REFRAM members to contribute to any cooperation in the field of developing the legislative managerial framework and tools for regulating online content platforms, as well as our willingness to strengthen cooperation with other networks of regulators or organizations - such as UNESCO. We also hope to strengthen the dialogue between REFRAM members and representatives of the major digital platforms in the French-speaking world. This is the purpose of the draft declaration that we will be proposing for adoption at our statutory session tomorrow morning, at the close of our discussions.

Over and above the success of these next two days and of this conference, which we obviously want to be full and complete, the relevance and impact of our actions will come under the control of the quality of our work and our day-to-day cooperation over the coming months and years. In this respect, you can count on my involvement and that of Arcom over the next two years - and beyond.

Wishing you and us a fruitful working session and a pleasant stay in Paris, I am delighted to hand over to the President of REFRAM, our friend and counterpart, Mr. Nouri Lajmi.