Hello, everybody. Welcome to the car hacking village TurboTalks with Samir and Vlad. I'm using smart cars with QR codes. Welcome, everyone. My name is Samir. I'm the senior director security consulting for Spartan security labs. And along with me I have Vlad. Hello. My name is Vlad Gassimelski, senior security consultant at Spartan Federal. Samir and I work on doing security assessments on various devices, smart vehicles, scale systems, wide scale distributed networks, satellite systems. That's our thing. Applications, mobile and anything in between. So let's get started. We have for today's agenda we are talking about abusing smart cars with QR codes. And for you, we'll talk about history of QR codes. QR codes have been around for over two decades. How QR code got ventured into the automotive space? What are they being currently used for in automotive industry? Especially with smart cars. What are some of the security challenges around it? And some of the trivia questions that we are going to have. So please listen in carefully. You are going to win a t-shirt that I'm wearing. Do good, no evil. We are not going to give it in the talk. So whoever wins, please collect it with Tej. He's sitting right in the end. You can see his hand right there. So let's get started. So history of QR codes. As I said, right, I mean it's been there for over two decades. It was born in Japan with the two people team, Mashahiro Hara and one more team member. Denso Corporation was sort of the owner for that. It gained its popularity in 2002 when it started getting used for general purposes, for ticketing systems, for advertising, for various other things. So previously when the QR codes were used, people were using dedicated readers for them. Just like the kind you see in the store for scanning prices of various products. As smart phones became more popular, it was not able to, it was not possible to capture with your phone scammer and decode it. So it really opened up the market for everyone. Home users were now able to open up hyperlinks, their instructions with their smartphone. They're able to follow directions, check in at various locations, do their own inventory control. Alright, that brings us to our first trivia question. Which automaker first started using QR codes and when? Alright, when? Alright, you get half of a t-shirt. Anyone else wants to take a stab at it? 99? 94? Alright, you get the other half of the t-shirt. Yes, so you're right. Toyota started using them in 1994 for actually tracking the parts and the cars that they were making. So please make sure that you get your half-and-half t-shirt frontage. Current use of QR code in transportation industry is sort of like now widespread, right? They are using for, just as I said, tracking cars and its parts for inventory control, for fleet tracking. Also, Michigan Department of Transportation recently started using them for signal repairs. So the image that you see is actual image where instead of having a big log that they used to store in the signal repair box itself, now instead of that they take their smart devices, scan the QR code and then through that they are able to gain all the information that they need to have for repairing the system. It's being also used widely in automotive sales. It's sort of like replicating the good salespeople because you can actually scan a QR code and get a consistent message about what this vehicle is, what are its capabilities, engine, et cetera, et cetera. And marketing and promotions have been around for ages. So can anybody tell me if a QR code can be hacked? Do you want to elaborate a little bit on it? So you get a negative T-shirt? Yes, gentlemen in the back. Absolutely. You do get a shirt. The overall answer is no.  So now that it cannot be hacked, what is the real problem? I think the next few images will tell you what the real problem is. When we start really using them for telling directions to smart cars and autonomous vehicles. And this is happening in California. California Department of Transportation is the first one to actually start rolling out QR codes on the side of the roads. That's because it's the number one location in the United States right now. We're autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles are on the roads. Right now they're using them to signal the construction zones ahead. They're starting to roll out speed limit signs in the form of QR codes. So anyone want to take like a guess on what are other problems that can happen in a smart cars with QR codes? There are more T-shirts to give away? All right, I'll make it easy for you. So the first thing is right, I mean, you could have a QR code that maliciously directs you to a link that gets you, that gets a malware onto your moving vehicle or for a particular component. Then there are issues with physical manipulations. If in the night someone switches the QR code from stop sign to speed at 50 miles an hour, that could be an issue. So you could cause a lot of havoc. And then some intentional and unintentional removal of the code. If the next generation cars are going to rely on QR codes for V2X communication, then you have an issue. Because if there are lighting issues, if it's unable to read the sign, if it's, if there's too much bright light, if there's raining or other environmental factors, that could be an issue unless it's been coupled with other technologies like GPS and others. That's right. So for example, if you're, when you do V2V V2X communication, you're using a radio signal, the signal could be monitored. There are actually ground listening stations that would observe that communication and notice if something is happening that possibly shouldn't. As a police officer drives down the road, they can physically look at the signs and they will know if something is missing. But if it's a QR code sign, since it's not human readable, a human can't actually immediately recognize if the sign has changed or has been tampered with. Even if somebody walks up with a sharpie marker and draws on it, it'll A, modify the sign or B, make it unreadable. And somebody driving by 70 miles an hour will not be able to tell the difference. Now, this is one of my favorites. So I did mention speed limit signs. If somebody were to swap out speed limit signs for 25 miles an hour school zone and 75 miles an hour on the highway, they're both valid signs. But transposing in different locations, you're impacting the school zone as well as the highway for the smart vehicles that would actually be designed.  Other fun signs to move around are the one-way signs, traffic keep left, keep right, or if you're trying to merge the 287 north or south and the human readable sign is very clear, where's the QR code that's selling your smart vehicle to, again, the wrong lane. Obscuring QR codes, right? That brings a lot of issues. So like, if there's a mud splash on the QR code, you cannot read it. If there's stickers, someone put, and graffiti, graffiti artists love to draw on signs that are on the side of the road or overhead, that could be an issue because then it becomes unreadable. There are lighting issues, as I talked earlier. Rain or snow can affect the visibility of those signs and our readability of those signs. And then also other environmental factors like sun damage, they can get faded over time. Those are some of the valid use cases. And then, obviously, the thieves, like the guy, this one, he likes holding these boards for some obvious reasons. Yeah, so as we were looking for an image for the slide, the first thing that struck me as I found those images, oh man, I don't have one of those signs yet. And having lived near High Street, you wouldn't believe the number of times that sign disappeared. And if that sign is removed, this is what you're expecting. So the kind of things you typically wouldn't think about as a human driver, a sign for a boat ramp or a sign warning you to stop, is not necessary for a human driver because you see that there's a boat ramp. Whereas a semi-autonomous vehicle can proceed going down the road because it's a nice paved road, nice gradual decline, and a parking spot at the very bottom. Malicious links. We did talk about how a smart car can get itself into a situation where a malicious code can be downloaded on it. It could be a malware or something. So it scans a QR code, QR code then directs it to a malware site and then malware gets dumped onto the vehicle. So that's again a possibility with the QR codes as an issue. Exactly. So as we mentioned earlier, we have not seen any successful implementations of an actual buffer overflow within the QR code. But the gentleman in the back left correctly pointed out, if you tamper with external things the QR code actually points you at, whether it's a URL shortener or another resource, you can actually then push across a malicious code via that avenue. And as Vlad mentioned earlier, these changes are not really noticeable by human eyes. So it's a machine readable code only. So if a stop sign gets changed by the yield sign, you would not be able to tell unless you have a QR code reader. So that also brings issues with both intentional and unintentional attacks because someone who's trying to actually just be on the side of the road, try to service them and switch one with the others, that could create a havoc. So one of the best attack vectors is the human. If you've ever seen the fine paving job, the Department of Public Works sometimes does and the way they put up signs, you know, imagine if they're putting up QR code signs. It's very conceivable to actually see them putting up the wrong sign because they were pretty sure they were holding the right sign. They'll put up on the side of the road and move down to the next mile marker. One of the funniest things I found, somebody who was doing a little bit of experimentation with the camera systems on the semi-towners vehicles. So this is actually a non-stop driving car. But this is a car that has lane assist technology and it was turned on. And they had a little bit of fun with salt. And they actually made a solid line, a dotted line around the vehicle and the vehicle refused to drive out. So they essentially made a smart trap. You've probably seen it previously in the movies in the voodoo acts that spray salt around and things go away. I use it for driving ants and killing them around my house. But you can also do that for smart cars. So now that brings us to kind of like towards the end of it, which is the solutions. There aren't really very many solutions because first of all the technology and its implementation in the automotive space is very new. And one could do like a unique signing of the QR codes to say only autonomous cars or self-driving cars can actually read it for its authenticity. The other things that you could also do is like cryptographic validation. So essentially for example a California Department of Transportation can create a signing key and sign their signs.  I think the most interesting one is actually GPS validation. And that's encoding the correct GPS location of that sign within the QR code. So then your smart car would actually compare its current GPS location, have a bit of wiggle room and interpret the sign as valid or invalid. But then of course you would have to depend on the trust within the GPS system and the fact that there's no GPS poofing happening around you or the fact that the GPS is actually reliable in your area. And of course attackers could also refactor their own signs. Once a standard informant is known it's only a matter of time until the attackers advance as well. So does anyone know what is a SR code? What's the full form of QR code? Quick response. SR code is a slow response code. So when you add cryptographic overheads to it, it can make a QR code into an SR code and it will look like this. All right. So onto again trivia questions. Who can name a few ways that QR codes can be manipulated? Yes. Who remembers the first wide scale marketing deployment of QR codes? Yes. Actually it was a federal agency. Here's a hint. They were putting up pictures of zombies asking are you prepared? So a certain agency that's interested in people making sure that they actually have preparedness kits at home and that they know how to deal with a pandemic outbreak was putting up posters and QR codes on New York City bus stops.  And we actually did, yes, I have a question in the back. Yeah, essentially negative space attack. Yes. That would absolutely work. But these individuals were actually putting up links to a malicious website and to spam websites. And it's really bored. People were sitting there at the bus stop would take pictures of it and follow those links. Can you answer your questions? Yes. So we've been playing with a few HUD units. We've been able to observe crashes with malicious codes. We've been able to craft up. We have not been able to get code execution. I don't think anybody else has been. But the fact that you can get a system to lock up and reboot isn't indicated that there's definitely avenues to be explored there. That's why the talk is kind of like futuristic looking because we have we have seen the smart cars trying to use it. There was actually a news article on it which I which was the reason why we did this talk. This was almost like a month or two months ago. That's right. So what happened is the California Department of Transportation said they're going to roll out the system. So any autonomous vehicles that have cameras on board, it's just a matter of firmware update. No many factors are doing it because science haven't shown up yet. But as they started turning up next few months, next few years, they're going to see firmware updates coming out specifically to be able to read them. We do have an advanced HUD unit that can read them right now. But I do want to say that I don't believe that it's going to only depend on just the QR code scanning. One, they probably would be smarter than that. Not to rely on that. We really hope. So we do see that, especially in inner cities. It's very popular. In inner cities, where people may not necessarily be friendly to police officers, it's very common to take a street sign and turn it at 90 degrees. So that somebody trying to orient themselves or somebody trying to respond would get the street cross section wrong or they're going down one street and the street they're going down changes. So now imagine being able to use two autonomous vehicles that are supposedly immune to this.  But if you're missing a eighth of a QR code, the error correction will not make up for it. You simply have a sign that doesn't readable to you. And it could be a construction zone, a head sign, it could be a 70 mile an hour sign, or it could be a stop sign. And that's why I commented earlier, right? When the autonomous vehicles become a reality, which is very close, I don't think they will rely solely on the QR code and that's my hope. Because again, I mean, we just shared several examples in use cases where it could fail if it just relies on a QR code scan. Exactly. So what happened is once we saw the California Department of Transportation announcement, we were able to grab the specs, we were able to grab some of the sample signs. I had used with some of the first firmware that is supposed to be able to read it. And that's all we had to go on because that's available right now. It's in a proposal phase and hopefully it's going to go through a few revisions before it actually becomes mainstream. Has anyone, and this is a curiosity question, it's not a trivia question, has anyone been able to or doing any research in doing a man in the middle attack for with QR codes? Doing a remote attack with a man in the middle? In the room? In the middle. Something where you are sort of be able to intercept the image before it gets read by the device. Yeah, so that's another one thing that they could do to at least minimize the human, what you call the physical tampering. But yeah, it opens up other issues because again, with the digital image projections, then there's lighting issues, there's like depth issues of the colors and other things. So there's other factors that needs to be taken into consideration. So the funniest thing that I've been able to play with is those of you that remember those little badges that you had as little kids with googly eyes were depending which end you look at, it's a different image. It's actually possible to print out QR codes. So if you're in the left lane or the right lane, you're seeing a different QR code. And they actually appear to be read really, really well. The fact that you have a prism facing out actually means that you're getting less interference from the rain and snow and less grime on it. So they actually become less readable than real flat QR codes. Any other questions? All right, so last housekeeping slide, if you guys have any other questions that you haven't asked yet or you were a little bit shy and want to have a private conversation, you can reach out to Vlad and I at spiron.com or Vlad at spiron federal.com. And then you can reach out to also security labs. We will be in Car Hacking Village booth, so if you have any other questions that you want to get answered today, do reach out at Car Hacking Village. And thank you for attending.  Thanks, everyone. Thank you.


The U.S. Navy called it Operation Forager. This mammoth invasion, commonly known as the D-Day of the Pacific, involved 535 ships and 127,571 assault troops. Operation Forager proposed to liberate the Marianas Islands by reclaiming the U.S. territory of Guam and by occupying the nearby islands of Saipan and Tinian. The seizure of these islands formed the lynchpin of Admiral Chester Nimitz's strategy in the Central Pacific. Once taken, these islands could serve as forward bases, giving the United States new options for the next stage of the Pacific War. With the Marianas under their control, U.S. forces could head south and liberate the Philippines, or they could move north through the Bonnens and attack the Japanese home islands. Even more importantly, U.S. Army air forces could establish airfields in the Marianas from which they could launch long-range bombing missions over Japan. A prolonged bombing campaign could, in theory, soften up the home islands for invasion, or perhaps it could even win the war entirely on its own. In any event, the Marianas needed to be taken. Operation Forager was the plan to do it. To carry out this important operation, Admiral Nimitz selected the Navy's fifth fleet under command of Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance. While carrying members of the 27th Infantry Division and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Marine Divisions, Spruance's fleet planned to encircle the islands, bombard the landing beaches, and then send in the assault troops. By late April 1944, all the details were set. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the commander of 5th Fleet's amphibious ships, scheduled the first landing on Saipan to take place on June 15th, departing from the Hawaiian islands in early June 1944, 5th Fleet sallied forth, and by the 12th, Spruance's carrier planes began their aerial bombardment of Japanese shore defenses. Turner's amphibious forces landed on schedule, and with that, the two-month battle for the Marianas Islands commenced. As the Marines and Army infantry slogged their way inland, the U.S. Navy now had orders to repel anything the Japanese might do to disrupt the invasion. Unsurprisingly, Japanese naval commanders were eager to strike back. Back in the spring, Fleet Admiral Minichi Koga devised Order 73, also known as Operation Ago, which envisioned a single decisive battle to change the momentum of the Pacific War. Order 73 did not specify a location for this battle, but it supposed that the Imperial Combined Fleet could counterattack in the midst of an American amphibious assault. Unfortunately for Admiral Koga, he never implemented his plan. On March 31st, he was killed when a seaplane in which he was traveling crashed in the middle of a typhoon. As soon as Koga's replacement, Admiral Swaymu Toyoda learned that Americans were coming ashore in the Marianas, he decided to dust off Order 73 and put it into effect. He called upon Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's mobile force to set sail from Tawi-Tawi and take out Spruance's 5th Fleet. Ozawa assembled a massive fleet of 62 ships and 24 submarines. On June 16th, Ozawa's ships exited through the San Bernardino and Serragao Straits. Several U.S. submarines on patrol detected these convoys and radioed the news of the impending Japanese arrival to Spruance's flagship, USS Indianapolis. Additionally, direction-finding technology at Pearl Harbor pinpointed a possible location for the Japanese Task Force after Ozawa broke radio silence to make contact with his airbases on Guam.  Even though his carrier Task Force commander, Vice Admiral Mark Mitchell, proposed to sail west and bring the U.S. fleet in range of the Japanese by morning, Spruance denied him. He believed the entirety of the 5th Fleet needed to remain next to Saipan. Spruance later commented, It was of highest importance that our troops and transport forces on and in the vicinity of Saipan be protected, and a circular movement by enemy forces be guarded against. This decision later led to controversy. Mitchell commanded a large and capable force, the Fast Carrier Task Force. When it was attached to 5th Fleet, the Fast Carrier Task Force was called Task Force 58 and it consisted of 112 warships. Mitchell believed his force could be Ozawa's on its own, and when Spruance's orders arrived at Mitchell's flagship, a great many officers assigned to Task Force 58 were beside themselves with anger and accused Spruance of having no guts. Dutifully, Mitchell adhered to his orders. Whether right or wrong, Spruance's decision made it clear that an epic battle would take place in the Philippine Sea and that the Japanese would choose the time of first contact. For two days, June 19th and 20th, 1944, the fate of the Pacific War hung in the balance. In the following videos, you will hear the words of participants from the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Many of the veterans who fought there have since passed on, but before they died, they left behind vivid accounts of their experiences. Voice actors will read aloud their words to bring their recollections back to life. From them, we can learn what it was like to have witnessed one of the biggest naval air battles in world history.


When the narcissist is on their deathbed, after everything you have been through with the narcissist, I'm sure you can't wait until they die. Or maybe the narcissist in your life has already died and you had to take care of them up until that point.  They were never kind to you. They were so abusive to you that you developed psychic abilities. You became hyper aware because you were constantly walking on eggshells. You were constantly putting their needs before your own and they loved that about you. They wanted you to forget about your needs and focus on them and it's no different when they're on their deathbed. They will expect you to be there. They will expect you to take care of them, which may be a very difficult thing for you to do. But you may not want to help someone who has spent their entire life trying to destroy you.  It's no different to when they are sick and I am sure that you can remember how the narcissist was when they were sick. For many of you, I'm sure it's hard for you to forget. When the narcissist is on their deathbed, they will be worse than they usually are. They will be even more demanding and disrespectful. They will be even more arrogant and entitled. They will not apologize for everything that they have done unless they can use it to manipulate you. But that's only if their intimidation isn't effective. When the narcissist is on their deathbed, you should expect more manipulation and abuse. They will be mean until the day they die. They're not going to change. They can't just suddenly become a different person. All they can do is manipulate you. And the only people who will be there for them when they're on their deathbed are people who are still under their spell. Or people who just feel bad for not being there. And if you are there for them, they will be even more entitled. They will be even more ungrateful. And they will not show any remorse. They will not show any regret or guilt for what they have done. And when they die, you should not expect anything from them in their will. It will be left to the golden child. It will be left to their enablers. It will be left to the people who validated the illusions of their false self. People who were susceptible to their manipulation. People who didn't try to oppose their false narrative. People who kept a code of silence. They will leave money for people who weren't even there for them. But they won't leave anything for you. Even when the narcissist has the opportunity to correct the wrong that they have done. They still won't do it. They will be bitter and mean until the very end. They don't suddenly change. They don't apologize to you. So don't expect them to show remorse. Don't expect them to show humility. Don't expect an apology. Because in most situations, you're not going to get that from a narcissist. But even if you do, it's not going to be genuine. If it was, they would have corrected their wrong doings a long time ago. Why would anyone have to wait until the very end to try to correct the errors of their ways? They never spent any time with you. They never talked to you. They never got to know you. You were never enough for them because they were not enough for themselves. And that is why they were always distracted. They were always preoccupied with other things. Things that made them feel better about themselves. Things that made them feel like they're worth something. And it's no different when they're on their deathbed. They're not going to be happy just because you're there for them. That's not going to be enough for them. They're still going to take you for granted. Just as they always did. They never knew who you are. Because they never knew themselves. And that is why they were always distracted. That is why they were always preoccupied with other people and things. Because they needed other people and things to constantly tell them who they are. And they couldn't find that with you. You didn't tell them who they were. You didn't validate the illusion. You didn't support their false narrative. And that is why they were never there for you. That is why they were never committed to you. Because you were a bearer of truth. You were grounded in reality. So they weren't actually running from you. They were running from the truth and reality that they didn't want to accept. They were running from themselves. They were running from the shame that they didn't want to deal with. And when the narcissist is on their deathbed. Sometimes they may break down and cry. But that's only because their shame is eating them alive. They can't run from it anymore. Because they know their life is coming to an end. But even when they cry and they apologize to you. It's still all about them. They don't care about you. They just don't want to die. Because death is the ultimate loss of supply. There's no illusion when they're dead. There's no false self. It is the ultimate loss of their power and control. Thank you for watching. I hope this video resonates with you. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. If you would like to donate. My PayPal link is in the video description. Coaching Inquiries. You can email me at coaching.narcsurviver.co.uk. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


My name is Heather Conley. I'm Senior Vice President here at CSIS that looks after our Europe and Eurasia work. And we have been very excited about this conversation and this working paper that our super-duper adjunct fellow, Katya Salman, has put together, looking at aid for e-trade. So you're probably wondering why is a Europe program looking at aid for e-trade. We have been doing here at CSIS and along with my colleagues Scott Miller and others. We've been looking at the transatlantic trade space. Obviously for the transatlantic trade and investment partnership it's a huge pillar of our work. But rather than just talking about t-tip and more generic terms and on our support for it, we wanted to dive deeply into really what was changing within that transatlantic space and certainly data online training, trading. And our view was one of those key areas we wanted to take a look at and very gratefully Katya joined CSIS and helped us think through some very new and exciting ideas in this space. This project would not have been possible without the generous support of eBay and helping us think through some of the key issues they were looking at. And it was a great partnership and we're looking forward to again thanking our colleague who's not arrived yet but who's been a great partner with us. So we have a terrific panel of experts to help us think through this question. Katya is going to present her working paper, the outlines of that working paper. And then we're going to have our panel talk about from their perspective and their particular whether that's from a private sector think tank and international financial institute, how are they looking at e-trade and looking at specifically some of the ideas that Katya has put forward in her new working paper. So I'm going to get out of your way but I just want to briefly introduce our panelists before we begin. Of course Katya in her role as adjunct fellow with CSIS but she's also the founder and CEO of the equity crowd funding platform trade up capital fund and she's also the CEO of the trade research firm, next trade group and in her spare time of which I do not believe she has much. She is an adjunct professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and she's just been a fabulous partner, Katya. Thank you so much. After Katya gives her overview we're going to turn the floor over to Dr. Joshua Meltzer who's just around the corner, a fellow in global economy and development at Brookings institution and he too is an adjunct professor at CSIS and a reviewer of the Journal of Politics and Law. Josh focuses on international trade law and policy issues, a great deal of focus on the WTO and free trade agreements. And then we have Jennifer Sandford, senior manager of international trade and energy environment policy at Cisco Global Policy and Government Affairs. Jen has been an outstanding and long serving career in the international trade space prior to her work at Cisco. She was director of international trade policy at the American Electronics Association and has done an enormous amount of work on trade promotion authority in 2002 and working on a variety of instruments, PNTR, China's PNTR and other things. So we're delighted that Jen, you could be with us. And last but certainly not least, we have Fabrizio Aperti. I hope I pronounced that correctly, Fabrizio. Fabrizio is the chief of trade and investment unit at the end of, okay, chief of the trade and investment unit of the integration and trade sector at the Inter-American Development Bank. I clearly need more coffee, but that's a great title. And Fabrizio has done an enormous amount of work looking at the international trade and foreign direct investment promotion and technical cooperation projects at the IDB. And we look forward to hearing more about what the IDB has been up to in this space as well. This report was first started with an exciting working group that we held, in a meeting we held a workshop here at CSA several months ago. We had folks like Ralph Carter from FedEx, Martha Lawless from the International Trade Commission. We had some colleagues from the World Bank as well from eBay and others.  So with that, Cati, over to you. Thank you. For being here and to echo Heather, thank you, Heather, first of all, for a great partnership. And for eBay's generous support, this has been a wonderful collaboration with eBay, both in terms of the intellectual content and supporting us in this journey. So really appreciate it. Why don't I give you sort of the basics of the report and then we can turn to our panel for comments and broader discussion with all of you. What I would basically do is to divide this in three parts. One is to discuss the opportunity that e-commerce represents for companies and consumers around the world and in our trade. The second is to discuss the challenges that we're facing to the rise of e-commerce and growth of e-commerce globally. And the third area is this idea of aid for e-trade, how to catalyze, how to accelerate the rise of e-commerce for the benefit of the global trading system, for world trade and for small businesses in particular. So to go to the opportunity, some of you may have seen some of these data, it's actually quite striking. E-commerce has grown extremely rapidly in the U.S. economy as well as in the global economy. Between 2006 and 2012, almost doubled e-commerce in the United States. This is Commerce Department U.S. Census Bureau data on e-commerce. Much of e-commerce is still business-to-business transactions. About 12% in the U.S. is business-to-consumers. But what is impressive about this is that e-commerce is by now $5 trillion, $6 trillion in value, which is equivalent to a third of U.S. GDP. So dramatic expansion. The same happens globally. So e-commerce, if you start to think about it, has grown four times faster than the world economy over the past number of years. If you count, give it quite generous counting the global GDP growth. And this only shows the B2C e-commerce sales. So these are only perhaps 10% of all e-commerce sales. Globally, it's hard to get data on the B2B e-commerce. So using this B2C and dramatic growth at 20% double-digit rates globally. What's exciting to all of us in the trade arena is that a big component, big share of the overall e-commerce around the world is cross-border. And if you look further to 2017, several years out, five years out, an increasing amount of e-commerce around the world is, in fact, cross-border. So it's, in fact, trade between nations, 20% to 40%, depending on the region, is cross-border of the total flows of e-commerce. And the growth of cross-border e-commerce is very dramatic. So in certain countries and regions like East Asia, China is growing absolutely radically. So between 2013-2018, e-commerce in China is growing fourfold. And if you really put the numbers together, e-commerce is growing five times faster than the growth of world trade. So it's very dramatic expansion, particularly in the emerging markets. The figures are a little less in the advanced economies because it's more saturated already in terms of the penetration of e-commerce. But in Brazil, China, other emerging economies, absolutely dramatic growth. Now why are we so excited about this? Well, one key reason is that e-commerce opens tremendous opportunities for the so far marginal participants in trade. The small businesses, garage entrepreneurs, individual consumers to really participate and direct the flow of international trade. As you know, a lot of bulk of world trade is still driven by the large giant corporations. So in any one country, maybe one or 2% of companies, of the largest companies, run or contribute probably half, 60%, 70% to this country's trade. And if you look at the export participation as here in the figure of companies in exporting, in world trade, it's still minority. Minority, almost in any one country, only a minority of companies export. We've been hearing a lot about how ubiquitous globalization is. Well, it's not. Most companies don't export. In the United States, 300,000 companies export. What's that? That's 1% of US SMEs. And if you count only employment providing SMEs, then you're talking about 5%. So it's still a minority of companies. What happens if you look at only the companies that sell on eBay are so-called technology enabled? Well, almost 100% in every economy, almost 100% of those companies export. Dramatic difference to the online world. Absolutely striking. And even if you were to say, well, hey, let's look at the United States. A lot of these companies that do not export are probably services companies. Well, if you just take the manufacturing firms in the US, the figure of exporters is probably 25% still. Of middle market companies in the US that are more likely to export than small businesses, 40% export. So any which way you slice this figure, it's a dramatic difference between online and offline exporters. And it's very exciting to see that e-commerce kind of enables companies to engage in trade that they wouldn't be able to otherwise. And why is this? Well, one of the reasons, of course, is the visibility between buyers and sellers that e-commerce provides. One of the great hurdles to trade is the distance between buyer and seller located far apart. And e-commerce enables companies to be much more visible, enables products to be visible, and in fact, enables companies to be discovered by the foreign buyers. So oftentimes, a company that sells online becomes discovered by a foreign buyer and kind of accidentally becomes an exporter. But what's interesting about this is that if you look at a little deeper, this is eBay data on Chilean firms, companies in Chile, again comparing the technology-enabled companies that sell online platforms versus the offline sellers. So another dramatic difference between the two sets of companies is that the number of destinations, the export diversification in terms of market diversification of online sellers is dramatically higher than for offline sellers. So for Chilean companies, the typical company, Fabrizio knows this well, exports probably to one to two countries, one, two, three countries, whereas the online seller exports to an average of 28 countries. Incredible diversification for companies. If you look at the survival rates of entrants, i.e. companies that engage in trade for the first time in year one, do they still export in year two? Do they survive into exporting in year two or three? Typical company does not. Only 30% of companies in Chile and this is very much the same data around the world survive in the export game. Most of them don't export after they may have a few export transactions in a given year and then they stop in the second year. Online, again, the difference is striking. 80% survive, they continue exporting and what does this do to a country? Well, these survivors or sustained exporters are key to the growth of export volumes. So e-commerce provides both market diversification, export diversification, as well as export-led growth. Very exciting data. So just to summarize the opportunity here, e-commerce increases export participation, particularly the smaller companies that have so far been outsiders to the international trading system, propels export diversification, increases export volumes and of course it's good for all of us we get greater variety of products, greater quality of products at better prices. So how do we accelerate this? In a way you might ask, well, we saw that e-commerce is growing globally but why isn't it global already? Why is it still maybe 10% of all world trade? It's still not quite as global as we would like and certainly the penetration of e-commerce is not the same in emerging markets as it is in the transatlantic arena, say. So what do we do? What's the challenge here? Well, there are a number of challenges that come through the work that Josh and Jen and others have been doing. One is just to go through this quickly, a lot of you have read about this, digital protectionism, data protectionism, number of issues there, data flows across borders, all of these hamper the participation of e-commerce platforms of companies in e-trade and if you drill further down, data, we're talking a lot about data flows in this town, data is a critical ingredient, if you will, to a number of services and goods that are being traded across borders. So as governments restrict access to data, they also increase the cost of goods and services and so this is basically a very much access, a tariff and reduces, it has actually negative implications to GDP growth in countries, has in particular been shown. What comes through in surveys in emerging markets in particular is that the security and ease of online payments is a major problem for small companies to transact online. Consumers just don't believe that their personal data online is safe, they don't necessarily trust in online payment systems and these come through surveys as some of the major challenges for the spread of e-commerce. There are trade compliance costs, we're talking about a very different set of participants in trade than ever in the past where probably the importer of record is an individual consumer and the exporter could be a company run by two or three people. Now these people have much more limited capacities to comply with trade regulations or the complex rules than even mid-sized companies do. There are distribution shipping issues in emerging markets and certainly then digital divides, so the traditional digital divides probably are the key and Jen you can pick up on this are probably the key to the spread of e-commerce globally. The ICT infrastructures are still poor in particularly the LTCs, Africa Middle East, developing Asia and then in a number of economies there is kind of the second digital divide which is that they may have a good ICT system, they may be quite connected but they haven't translated those connectivity, their connectivity to economic gains and this includes kind of the emerging markets Eastern Europe, so to paint a picture here this is data from the World Economic Forum on the x-axis are the economic impacts from ICT, what do countries actually, do they actually translate these gains from ICT connectivity into economic impacts and on the y-axis you have the ICT infrastructure quality so here at the bottom are poor countries with poor ICT infrastructure quality and of course low economic gains and it's typically the African countries, sub-Saharan African countries that tend to be there in the bottom left-hand side and here are a set of countries with rather good ICT infrastructure but still countries that derive low economic gains from their connectivity and this includes a number of the Eastern European countries that Heather deals with, Latin American countries Fabrizio deals with so this is probably not surprising data for you all but there is much to be done on both sets to raise their game and get them up to where the advanced economies are at the top right-hand corner. One of the reason perhaps for the low gains in translating ICT connectivity into economic gains and trade gains is that SMEs are still not that connected to the web. They do quite a bit, this is data from the World Bank, they do quite a bit of emailing and so forth with their clients but if you ask them, well, do you have your own website let alone, well, do you sell products through online platforms or your own e-commerce platform? The answer is more likely to be no than yes so there's much work to be done here particularly in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa but certainly in Latin America as well. There's quite a, there's potential to have these figures at much higher levels. Now, so how do we solve some of these challenges? How do we tackle the problems that are there confronting us in them and blocking and decelerating if we're arresting the potential of e-commerce? We came up with this concept of aid for e-trade and what is perhaps different about this is that this is kind of a comprehensive initiative. The idea here is to be focused minds of the donor community right on the back of some of the momentum in trade integration that we see in TTIP, TPP in other regions of the world and the channel resources much like aid for trade initiative has done over the past decade. Aid for trade as all of you know has channeled $200 billion in developing countries particularly in infrastructure boosting their productive capacity and so forth over the past decade and the spirit here is very much the same so why not take a focused initiative on e-trade alone which has not been the focus of aid for trade if you look at the numbers kind of e-commerce, e-trade related projects have been perhaps 1% of that $200 billion and so our idea here is to boost that figure significantly and have a focused initiative only on e-commerce given that it's an arena of its own challenges its own opportunities. So one goal here could be $100 billion in the next five years in boosting e-commerce. The spirit of this is very much a public private partnership. There are a number of stakeholders such as I would suggest eBay probably Jen agrees with these private sector partners that could work with public sector entities like the developing banks in furthering investments in projects that catalyze e-commerce. This could be conditioned on free and open internet policies so that countries that adhere to open internet and good kind of internet governance would be the ones that receive the benefits and receive the funding very much in the spirit of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and this could write on the momentum that we have of FDAs, oftentimes trade agreements give great momentum for development related work and development related projects. We've seen this in NAFTA, we've seen this in CAFTA in particular and why not in this arena and we have exciting initiatives like the Pacific Alliance in Latin America. APEC has had a long standing focus on SMEs as well as on e-commerce, could be another arena. TPP certainly has developing countries, developed countries that would benefit from increased e-commerce and TTIP as well. Why not, right? Eastern European countries are still behind the curve so TTIP could be used to catalyze them and pilot this perhaps and Jen was actually one that suggested this so you might pick up on that. Some of the key focus areas that aid for e-trade could play a role in very much like aid for trade, capacity building to leverage e-commerce so there's a lot of e-training needed for small businesses in developing countries to really learn to use e-commerce, use their connectivity for trading across borders. It's not as simple as it seems. It's not only putting your product up on an eBay platform or Mercado Libre or something like that. There are a number of issues related to product labeling, pricing, localization, positioning, you name it. It's their advertisement, marketing online that small businesses also have to master if they are to be successful in exporting through online platforms. Another focus area could be guaranteeing safe and high quality payments, online payment systems. This is really a bottleneck in emerging markets so it should be a key focus. And again, every arrive for public-private partnerships as well, trade compliance issues. We actually are working on another paper here with Heather related to this very topic. Of course, distribution shipping is quite antiquated. We feel like distribution shipping globally works wonderfully, but there are still a lot of inefficiencies in that process so that could also be catalyzed and improved through investments in e-commerce. And finally, there could be policy advice, just this standard policy advice for countries, particularly perhaps in the LDCs and lower end of the spectrum on internet governance and e-commerce policies. And these five points perhaps are best for countries that are number one, have those good internet policies in place, but second, that already have some capacity and infrastructure. There's another set of countries altogether that lack infrastructure. So that's kind of the, of course, the necessary area to address in the beginning. So let me conclude with this, what do we have to decide on if we're pursuing this as the international community, as perhaps US government or any other set of actors? Is the priority countries, what do we focus first on? We have maybe suggested here that the focus could be on the lower hanging fruit countries that are already have overcome some of the infrastructure bottlenecks and now are in a place where they could take better advantage of their connectivity. Another important issue to decide on is monitoring and evaluation of these projects. Aid for trade has actually had a major problem here in this area. Projects have not been monitored as well as they could. Membership, also in kind of multi-stakeholder coalitions who is going to participate, private sector partners, foundations, governments and so forth, how to manage these coalitions and another challenge to work through. And then the coordination of the initiative is also critical. Aid for trade has been coordinated by the WTO and OECD. Perhaps here is a place for multilateral development bank like the World Bank, IDB, ADB coming together with the WTO could be rather powerful combination in my opinion. And then there could be a starting point, could be a Pacific Alliance, could be TPP, could be TTIP as a kind of a pilot from which we learn and from which we grow forward. And one area, one idea we had in the paper to leave you off with, one idea is a platform that gathers data on information, data and information on e-commerce investments, e-commerce policies, policy barriers on e-commerce and policy innovations as well. That informs the world as to what's going on in e-commerce. I've yet to see anything like this and this could be a very useful complementary tool to the idea. So thank you very much. I've gone on for a long time and very much look forward to the panel. Cathy, thanks so much. It was a super overview and it's a very exciting report if you haven't had a chance to read it. I commend it to you. Great, thanks. And Kati, thank you for the paper and the presentation. It's a very wealth rich paper with a lot of information in there, a lot of great, I think, policy ideas and proposes and I think gives us all a lot to work with and to think about and to talk about going forward. I've been asked to speak fairly briefly and so I'll do that. I think one of the things that comes out of your presentation, Kati, and something I just want to talk about a bit more briefly, is firstly the importance of platforms. You know, because, I mean, you were speaking a lot about eBay and obviously there's, eBay's been great in terms of giving opportunities to small enterprises to export and of course there are other platforms which are becoming competitive and also significant in the US and in other countries. And I think that one of the things that comes from this is the idea that, first of the opportunities become economy-wide. So, you know, we're talking about small and medium-sized enterprises. We're talking about goods. We're also talking about services often as well where there's a lot of key opportunities there. And, you know, the way that the globalization of the internet and access to it has really had an impact on businesses and economic sectors which are not really IT anymore. So the IT now is being understood essentially as sort of a supporting framework and it is sort of using that framework to become global which I think is often a really key message because often, you know, the IT infrastructure is, you know, at times you get governments who see the IT infrastructure being very American, for instance, and the point I think is that, you know, this is not about an American business model necessarily, it's about giving the rest of your economy the opportunity to actually use these services, use these platforms to go global. I think that's a really important message that certainly comes out of your paper as well. I think the other thing which is really interesting about this is how much of this in a way is consumer driven in a way which is a slightly different to the way we normally think about just commerce and international trade generally because you can be, I guess, on eBay, take it as an example and, you know, you may not necessarily set yourself up as an international trader in an international company but if it happens to be the case that someone from Canada or China or wherever, you know, gets online and purchases your goods, suddenly you're an international trader. So, you know, and I think this is like part of the crux of your thinking here is, you know, we need to, we need solutions both at sort of the business end and in a way at the consumer end which, you know, is different to the way we've normally been thinking about enabling consumers because they are going to, to some extent, drive the patterns of trade more than the strategic thinking of the businesses which is normally generally been the case and then you obviously get into the situation that you get an order from another country and then you have to be able to fulfill it and you run into all these challenges of, do I have the payments, et cetera, set up and can I get it to that country in time and all of those costs which are still there, which are important, which still need to be addressed. So, you know, it's, just thinking about this, I guess, from the consumer end clearly, I mean, one of the things that's happening which is very important here is the growth in internet access. There's about 4 billion people still in the world who do not have internet access. Most of these are in the developing world and by, you know, the ITU estimates that internet access will double by 2020. Obviously, most of that growth will be in the developing world. You made the point that there is sort of saturation in a sense in the developed world so you would expect that growth to be there and you combine this obviously with very large growing middle classes in Asia and elsewhere and that's, I think, where the beginning of the opportunity certainly lies. The other trend, and, you know, Cisco's got some great data on this is the extent that this, the accessing of the internet is going to be on smart devices and on mobile devices and so that's going to both generate data which you mentioned and it's also a completely different way of interacting with the internet and the way of consuming on the internet which is also going to change patterns of trade in fairly significant ways which I think we're really only beginning to understand and think through. So just one example, in the developing world broadly sort of access to smart devices expected to double in the next three or four years which is fairly significant. I mean, the penetration's already fairly high in the developed world and then we get into interesting ideas such as internet of things which the access of smart devices and global data flows is going to sort of underpin and there are a lot of, I think, emerging opportunities not only in the United States but in Europe for building on that and the types of consumption patterns that are going to change again, I think, importantly in the services area in particular but also certainly on the good side, big data which we talk about and the opportunities both commercially and otherwise are going to come from that also going to be significant. So the other thing which I think is a really interesting part of what's happening here is the sort of, you talked about the B2B which I think is really key here because one of the possibly undeveloped opportunities here is still the opportunity for businesses to use the internet to access inputs themselves often services but at times goods to improve their productivity, their competitiveness and their capacity to then also engage in international trade and in a sense there's possibly a win-win situation for the United States at least which clearly has a comparative advantage when it comes to sophisticated services being provided online, you're providing that to developing world businesses which can then improve their own competitiveness and productivity and then engage in the next stage of selling to consumers and all of this can be enabled online and it gets back to, I think, the framework you talk about in your e-trade proposal where you need to build up the bottom-up internet capacity and internet access and the like to actually enable that to happen. The other bit which is going on as well obviously in the B2B space, I guess, is that we have commercial transactions, we have a lot of, I guess, internal business-driven activity which isn't being picked up in a lot of the trade data and the trade statistics which is still important and from a positive perspective, I guess, it's also hard to get at because the data is not there in a sense and there's so whether we're talking about managing sort of supply chains or the type of R&D and collaboration that the internet enables to happen globally and this is an increasingly important business activity which the internet is allowing and as you build it out in the developing world, the opportunity for developing world businesses to be part of that process grows and I think that's another opportunity there which certainly I think your proposal can help at getting at. I think when we think about the aid for each trade, the only thing I want to, you had a very comprehensive list of ideas in terms of building out the opportunities for SMEs, particularly in the developing world to engage in e-commerce. One of the things, and you do mention this, that seems to come up as one of the issues here is even once you've got the internet access, you need to obviously build out both the literacy, the skills in that area and then you also run into issues to do with language. If you've probably come across this a bit in Latin America, you certainly see this in Asia where the internet's still coming out of obviously the United States in particular but other parts of the world is driven by English and so the capacity for small businesses in non-English speaking countries to really benefit from the internet is a simple thing in a way but actually not a simple thing to address necessarily but it's certainly I think part of the picture there. The other thing which is I think an issue which bubbles under the surface implicitly, sometimes quite explicitly, is this issue of trust and different countries and different consumers have different ways of thinking of this if you talk to Europe at the moment, yeah, this all gets framed in terms of what happened with Snowden and the security angle. Other parts of the world who were less concerned about that just think about it in terms of the security of their data, their information, this is where privacy becomes a significant issue and so building out a framework which is going to allow consumers and businesses who don't have the opportunity essentially to meet each other to trust each other and to make that transaction as well I think is gonna be a really key part of sort of the social environment which is gonna make this possible. There's, I think these people are aware of this there's obviously some attempt through trust or trademarks and the like but this is still very nascent and early and it certainly hasn't been globalised and this could be part of also a way of thinking about the aid for e-tray concept to get at that issue at least. I'm not gonna talk, you've spoken, I think you gave a great overview of the types of sort of policy opportunities that are out there. There's obviously the free trade agreement negotiations where you can do some work on this both at the sort of internet access, data flow end as well as possibly building it into the sort of aid for e-trade scope of it and bringing in multilateral institutions into that space. I think it's a really great place so I just commend you on your paper and thank you for doing it. Josh, that was great. Thank you so much, Jen, please. Thank you very much and thank you to Heather and Katia for including me and appreciate being here. It's really an honour to be at CSIS. I too commend the paper. I think it's very well done and it focuses on some outcomes that were very passionate about at Cisco and I personally am very passionate about the diffusion of technology around the world to promote social, economic and even environmental benefits. What's amazing is that only 1% of the devices in the world are actually connected to the internet and so there's a tremendous amount of opportunity to connect more of the unconnected and it's not just things but also people and processes and data and things in which Cisco talks about the internet of everything, not just the internet of things because adding the people and the processes in that really adds value to those connections. We've estimated that between 2013 and 2022 that there's $19 trillion of net new economic value that's up for grabs. With the advent of the internet of everything and so I think, as you're saying, the pie is getting bigger and that's really exciting because these technologies are being adopted and utilized not just in the United States but in developing countries as well. So how does that relate to your paper? I mean, I really kind of ravaged through your paper. I thought it was very interesting data, very helpful data and I think the idea here is how can we focus our investments and focus our policy agenda? I focus on policy mostly and so I'm gonna talk from a policy end probably a little bit more than perhaps others to accelerate the adoption of the internet of everything and the idea of aid for trade and getting smaller businesses in particular but also other businesses around the world using the internet as a means of engaging in global commerce. With respect to the challenges, I was really struck by one of the statistics in your paper about that 90% of small and medium sized enterprises use the internet and only 18% reported making online sales. And so there clearly is a disconnect between I have a smartphone or I have connectivity to the internet and am I actually using the internet to engage in online sales? But as Josh had suggested, there are, and Kati, there are a lot of productivity gains that are realized as a result of using internet technologies. So we at Cisco look at sort of the total picture of the different types of connections that are made, the machine to machine connections and the internet of things, the people to people connections as well as the people to machine connections and we see that the internet is this vast ecosystem of connections from software that creates data that gets transmitted, that goes into the network that then rides on a physical infrastructure, right? And so you have this internet stack, if you will, and coordinating all of that is quite extraordinary that it happens, number one. But number two, there are opportunities, there are a lot of opportunities for challenges to come into play. So you talk about data protection and privacy, security and ease of online payments as well as this digital divide. And while I agree with those challenges, I think there are other challenges as well, including, and you had mentioned, you mentioned internet governance and you mentioned ecosystem, but I think we need to make sure that those ideas are brought into sort of the policy agenda so that the challenge are addressed by policies that change in order to create the reality you're looking for. So internet governance is clearly a very important aspect of internet policy today where we wanna maintain the multi-stakeholder system that's used to run the internet as we know it. Standards and interoperability are also really important things to keep an eye on. None of this works without industry-led standards and interoperability among the different stacks, technology stacks that is. And so I would hope that that would be an aspect to keep an eye on and make sure that in talking with these governments about what types of internet governance and e-commerce policies to erect, that we also have kind of a robust policy agenda, including spectrum policy. Harmonized spectrum is very important. Mundane things like duties and taxes, I think you had talked about trade compliance, but we really need to get those remaining sort of de minimis issues dealt with, particularly for smaller shipments. Trade facilitation and customs, very excited that the trade facilitation agreement is back on track and that we're gonna look forward to implementation there. I think that's in particular gonna help many developing countries to align their trading systems, if you will, to the global trading system provide some harmonization. And of course, export controls. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there are certain technologies that cannot be exported, at least from the United States or re-exported from another country without certain trade controls. And so I think that's an important part of peace of the compliance aspect of this that needs to really be taken into account. So in my view, the digital trade agenda is all of those things, right? It's addressing the data protectionism and localization, forced localization issues, requiring companies to process or store data in a particular country. I thought Josh was right on in mentioning security and trust. This is an issue that needs to be addressed multilaterally. And we need to probably incubate it and I'm very interested to see what happens in TTIP with the Safe Harbor Agreement on the margins. So I like your idea of export promotion for small businesses. And I'm very interested in particularly your suggestion of using technology in order to assure trade compliance and to facilitate that kind of trade. The conditionality I thought was a great idea as well. And with respect to coordination, you had talked about several different lending institutions and it just dawned on me that perhaps, including the IFC could also be a useful mechanism to make sure that there is that focus on developing countries and that link with the World Bank. So and your comments idea is a very interesting idea. I think it's a way to actually scale this over time because as you say, it's gonna be, you're gonna have to pick some priority countries and see how things go and get some lessons learned. But it's a way of capturing those lessons learned and then what works can be scaled from that. So I guess one question I had and which I think maybe would be right for discussion here was what would be the measure of success for would it be seeing those small SME numbers that are engaged in trade go up relative to the overall growth of e-commerce trade or what is your measure of success here? Because I think that's important to be mindful of and you talked about metrics and monitoring. So happy to discuss and take questions, thanks. Jen, thanks so much for museum. Thanks Heather and good morning everyone and thanks for the invitation, I'm honored. Trying to add to the thoughts and reflections before I think technology and trade and SMEs really undermines many of our traditional assumptions especially regarding the smaller players. Usually we've said that in economic literature and the small guys, the small companies, they're improductive, they don't have the economies of scale, they don't have the financial resources, they don't have the managerial acumen and expertise in order to export. So really they're improductive and they're pariah in the international trade in area. And that with technology and with e-commerce that is not holding truth. Whereas on one hand, we see that the smaller players don't export as much of course, the big companies are the ones that export. In Qatar's paper, only 1% of 30 million SMEs in the US have traditional export but as many as 97% of US companies are selling on eBay exports. Okay, so we have, McKinsey talks about the micro multinationals. The small company is born out of a garage in Argentina that are born global. There's a Guatemala firm. We were in Guatemala last week. We do a global services globalization trade event technical and matchmaking. It's the fourth edition, outsourced to lack, outsourced to Latin America and the Caribbean. Talking services, technology, software, BPO, ITO, engineering, video games, architecture, the export of services. And a little company out of Guatemala did the animation for a Hollywood film, Narnia, okay? That was done out of Guatemala. The kids, many of you don't have kids yet. Many of you do. They play the video game soccer, FIFA. FIFA, 2013, 14, they keep changing it. And it's very well done. That's out of Buenos Aires. Out of the outskirts of Buenos Aires. That's where it's done. Globant is that firm that does that. And of course, exports globally. A Uruguayan architectural firm designed the headquarters in Bangalore for TCS, for Tata Consulting Services. Because Mr. Tata went to Uruguay and really liked the building there, the free trade zone in South America. So really, the globalization poses many great opportunities and defies, especially technology and services. Many of our traditional thinking. In Latin America, actually, there's some elements which are very exciting. Almost half of the Latin Americans have internet access. Actually, internet access grew between 2000 and 2014, 900% in the region. One of the fastest growing regions in the world. And we are social people, but we're social online. The region is, they spend, Latin Americans spend twice as time, twice as much as time as the rest of the world in social media. And 60% of those social media users are age 15 to 34. So we have to start thinking who are we going to work with to apply that use of technology, internet, social media for international trade purposes. Not just to socialize and send emails, but rather to grasp opportunities from international trade. And I'll tell you in a few minutes what we've done about it or what we're trying to do from the IDB side. Internet users spend on average in a region 10 hours per month, that's twice as much as the rest of the world, on service like Facebook, LinkedIn, and especially Twitter. So as a whole, it's really in the region is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world and there are several statistics to sustain that. What we've done is from the IDB, the Inter-American Open Bank, we've worked trade integration as part of our genesis, as part of our founding mission in development. And we work with SMEs and with international trade, but we wanted to see what, given this scenario, what else can be done, what more innovative approach can be done. So we were working for almost two years doing focus groups in the regions with SMEs, with exporters or with wannabe exporters, or ex-exporters, the mortality rates and all. And the conclusion was that they faced three main barriers. One is information. It's not easy to export. For us, you know, in Washington with PhDs, with masters in international economics, trade development, we understand the jargon, although the spaghetti bowl is hard, but for an entrepreneur, an SME in Honduras or in Guatemala, it's not easy. The information out there is very complex, very difficult to digest, and that was one, you know, not only the tariffs, especially the non-tariff barriers, the standards, the certifications, the things you really need in order to acquire quality to be a sustainable exporter. So there was information, technical information as a barrier. Then the barrier of the contacts. Who you know, the buyers, the investors, the potential partners, the multinational firms, and even in our region, the multilatinas, they have the financial resources and the muscle to have specialized commercial intelligence departments that develop networks of contacts. For the smaller players, it's much harder. It's very hard, and trust there becomes very important. And then access to finance, access to credit, financial resources, which of course is a barrier, especially for the smaller and medium companies. So we put together all those elements that internet usage in our region was growing so much and were avid social media users, yet the smaller players are not exporting as much as they could. And then these barriers that we encountered with focus groups on the ground, having interviewed hundreds, thousands of small and medium companies. So we partnered up with Google, with DHL, with Alibaba.com and Visa, and we created a social network for businesses, the first social network for businesses, which is connectamericas.com. You have Facebook for the individuals to socialize. You have LinkedIn for the professionals to network, and this is a social network for companies to basically try to overcome these three barriers. So it's three words for those three barriers. Learn, connect, finance. So in learn, there's content necessary for exporters to access, to interpret, to understand in a very easy way with a lot of data visualization. And in three languages, language of course is a barrier, but you have in Spanish, English and Portuguese, and with the Google tools, you can translate it to every language because we have the Google translate there incorporating the platform. So you have information with the learn. Then you have connect, and connect is really what I think we think it's the most innovative approach because it's really the social media aspect within the platform. You can find companies, you can find profiles, you can find entrepreneurs, see what they're doing, you can send them emails within the platform, you can rank your exchanges, so it gives credibility and transparency to a platform. We do verification, we verify each company that comes in, and so that connect pillar is the one that has shown most usage and popularity. And then there's the finance. Finance is access to an easy access to the banks, the private banks as well as the multilateral like us that provide lending, direct lending for export or apart from trade financing, just various technical assistance programs that are out there to do that for the export purposes. So I do think there is a big role for multilateral development banks for the trade promotion organizations. This is not done on our own. This is done in close collaboration and alliance. With the TPO's and the chambers of commerce of Latin America, of the Americas, and also outside as well.  And then if Bolivia, which is a big producer, has the information, then you are in the trade promotion agency of Bolivia. And the online information that it has on the price, on the suppliers, if they do. That's called the functional integration. So we're function integrated with the chambers of commerce and with the trade promotion organizations of the region, also outside in Europe and in China and in Hong Kong, in Korea, and now in the future in Japan, because those are our three shareholders at the IEB from Asia. So we think there is a role for the governments to do promotion, to overcome these asymmetries of information, of access to finance. We are contributing element to that. We're not the panacea, we're not going to solve all the problems. But we are working very intensely with Uruguay 21, Pro Chile, Pro Mexico, Pro Expo Colombia, and all the rest in the region in order to really try to exploit these technological developments so that the smaller players can export, can become global players. And it's not only direct exports. Many times it's indirect exports through the supply chains as well. So we also think really important. We're excited because we see, not in theory, in practice, we see a lot of vibrancy and energy. In the first six months since we launched, we have 17,000 registered users linked in in the first six months at 30,000. And we've had more than 110,000 unique visitors. So there is, undoubtedly, there is curiosity. There is demand for this type of platform. In order to be sustained, you have to innovate and you have to make sure that it accomplishes actual specific results. And the metrics and the evaluation and the monitoring mechanisms become key, especially to report to our shareholders, which are funding this, both public donors and private companies. Because these companies have put resources in kind through experts, but also financial. And of course, we want more of that because we are in a startup mode and we face limited resources. So we really have to show that this is working. But from our experience in the ground and talking to many companies, they need this type of supports. Thank you so much. That was a great, very tangible example that, I thought, brought all of your presentations together beautifully. Before I open up for a question period, Katya, I just want to give you a quick second if you want to respond to any of the comments. We don't often do a peer review paper. As a panel discussion, I think we should do it more often. It's wonderful. But Katya, I want to give you a chance if you wouldn't have any response back to the three presentations. And then we'll start the Q&A. All of you from different angles. And perhaps what Fabrice is talking about, Connect Americas, is really bringing together a lot of the elements that perhaps this Aid for E-Trade initiative would bring public-private partnership, very tangible objectives of helping SMEs grow globally. And certainly, catalyze the digital economy that Jenny and Josh, you were talking about, because this is not only about e-commerce. Certainly, if we were to adopt this kind of initiative, it would help a lot of different players, a lot of different aspects. It would definitely catalyze the internet, everything. It would be just useful for a number of different players and a number of different areas, like finance, for instance, for small companies. So I appreciate very much the comments. And I think the matrix, like the goal is absolutely critical. What we've seen in the Aid for Trade initiative is that typically the annual gains are something like 3% extra trade for the spending, whatever the amount of spending is. So you can measure those with econometric tools and whatnot. But that sounds pretty dry. So I would imagine setting a goal, like having double the e-commerce transactions and double the participation of SMEs beyond what the forecast currently show. So if we invest $100 billion, then we double what's currently being expected in the next 10 years. That could perhaps focus minds and be quite exciting as a target. Fantastic. Well, before I start the question and answer period, let me throw out a question. I think we really, Josh, we're making that assumption that this is, although the business to business, we know the larger businesses are in the space and doing significant things. But it's unleashing the individual, the micro multinational. That is a great phrase. And how dramatic that is. But what we're finding in both this project and, as Katya mentioned, sort of a subsequent project looking at the security of that. And how do you unleash that micro multinational that has no clue all of the export control issues, the customs barriers, the physical security of moving the product across border? That, for me, is our biggest challenge. And I agree. I think from the policy agenda, the individual isn't even part of this conversation at all. Yet we see these extraordinary figures. Latin America, Turkey, other. The growth here is unbelievable. That also unleashes, from a policy perspective, the power of the individual of making choices and that competition, if you will, between the power of the individual and then the governing space that it's in. So I just welcome just a rapid fire. Katya joined in here as well. So how do you tackle this from a 30,000 level policy agenda that's really talking about that individual in Oklahoma that finds a buyer in Brazil and trying to make that work and grow? How does that reflect it in a policy agenda? Or we just can't get there yet. There's too many bigger issues in the larger trading agenda that we can't even focus on the individual. Katya, I'll just work our way down. Everyone can have a whack at that. Or anybody wants a whack at? Quickly. Yeah, I think this is, Heather, you put your finger on it. And it's not only if the importer is an individual, it certainly affects also the bigger companies that you were talking about. Take Walmart. Walmart is not present in India, but they, at least to my knowledge, they haven't come back. But they do sell online to Indian consumers or businesses. So there are a number of issues also for the larger companies that are very much part of the trade discussion. And perhaps it's something that Heather, you and I have been talking about is using and genuinely alluded to this, using technology to give a voice to the smaller players and give them capabilities. For instance, with trade compliance, the tools that we have currently, pretty rudimentary. Customs and border protection have done wonderful things here, but there are still a number of improvements that can be made in order to facilitate the trade compliance and understanding of smaller players about the complexity of trade roles. And that's definitely something that can be done with much more sophisticated tools like Connect Americas is a great example of that. So I think, I don't actually pick up probably part of what for Brits you are saying, but I think this is partly an export promotion agency issue, you know, because if you see, you know, there's this sort of tension in the allocation of resources, I think in the sense between the, you know, the extent that export promotion agencies want to help companies that have some experience already with exporting and what's becoming this opportunity where individuals and very small companies can go global quickly. So, and part, and often that's, you know, can be in a very explicit motivation of someone starting a business. I mean, whether we're talking about Latin America or in more developed parts of the world, you know, and particularly in the appropriate age bracket, which is, you know, increasingly digitally sophisticated, that people start businesses now thinking globally from the get-go.  And the Connect Americas is a great example. And I'm actually, you know, want to learn more about it. I was aware of it. I could say businessUSA.gov, which has just been launched, which is, you know, collecting the work of, you know, all export promotion agencies and other government agencies in the US on one website, which will facilitate, I think, that process. And you look around the world, there's a process underway in Copenhagen in Denmark that could match SME, which is an online platform, which is matching, essentially, small service providers with businesses. And you look at it in Canada. It's got this thing called CDMN network, which is a soft landing program for startups, helping them go international. So I think, you know, part of the answer, at least, is export promotion agencies becoming aware that the internet's enabling this and then having the tools in place, I think, to make it happen. As you say, we're going, you know, from the forest down to the, down to the blade of grass. Look, I think for smaller companies, you know, run by one or two people, you're absolutely right. They don't have time to engage in the policy issues. And it really is going to be the multinational companies that once were small companies, right? Cisco's only 30 years old. So we still remember, I was struck, actually, when I started the company about 10 years ago, how there still was this feeling of being a small company, even though, you know, we have 70,000 employees. There's a lot of green field. But the point is a company, a company like Cisco can invest in policy people like myself. But there are also the ITACs, the International Trade Advisory Committees. I believe that commerce spends quite a bit of time trying to attract small businesses to participate in the ITAC process. So we need to really educate small businesses that should be part of your commons to talk about, want to get involved, want to get, you know, want to make sure your voice is heard with respect to how these policies, they're not, they're not just static things. We are very fortunate in this country that, you know, we're a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and people can get involved. So perhaps that could be one way to add to your commons, so that we do get the voice of the small business person all the way up to the tree level into the policies. Just a quick two-finger on your ITAC comment. I don't believe, but please correct me if I'm wrong, there is an ITAC that is focused solely on the e-commerce. There is. There is one. It's ITAC 8. ITAC 8. It's e-commerce, IT, and services. So it's a number, but... Yeah, it's bringing a whole bunch of issues together. Because of the ecosystem nature of this type of industry. Yeah, on your comment, Heather, on your question, and we're saying the power of the individual, I would say the power of the entrepreneur. And I think we have to empower those entrepreneurs with good ideas that, and making it easy, or at least less difficult for them to conquer the markets. For that, we believe, and we're very committed from our development agenda and trade from the IDB with the work of the trade promotion organizations in our region. We work with literally all of them, from Haiti, where we've gathered some really tangible impacts. We worked in Haiti together, and we built an industrial park there. There's a huge textile operation, even after the earthquake that came, employees, 3,000 people, they're doing... There's contact center operations there to Chile and Uruguay and Colombia, where we're working in other sectors as well. So what do they have to do? These trade promotion organizations training, lots of training, and provide online training in order for exporters to keep up to date with all the regulations, procedures, and going beyond FDA. It's fine, yeah, FDA has its very own stringent rules to import food in the US, but then it's how Walmart buys, how Costco buys, how Safeway buys, those private standards. Walmart, by the way, is the first individual employer in Latin America. Walmart, 450,000 people. So streamlining procedures, making it easier. The one-stop shops we're doing, Ventanillas Unicas de Comercio Exterior de Buses, which we're funding, those one-stop shops to export and making it much, much easier, I think it's very important. And information, information is key. And I think in the future, and we're thinking about this, the sharing economy, the Uber of international trade. There's a lot of lost value when a container goes half-empty, or when Walmart says, yes, I like your gluten-free crackers, but I need four containers, and the company cannot do that. But if in association with others, they can do sharing, they can do associative partnerships in order to confront more scale. And that's a question of information. Information, standards, and very punctual, and specific, and precise information. So there's a lot of lost value that can be captured. And the entrepreneurs are very much aware of this. And increasingly, we see in the international trade events that we organized. In the past six weeks, we did an infrastructure investment event in Miami with 600 entrepreneurs. Four weeks ago, we did one in Changsha in China. With 2,500 Latin Americans, 1,500 Chinese. Three weeks ago, we did lack flavors for the food sector, gluten-free, organic, fur trade, kosher, halal, all those niches that are growing much in the markets. And last week, we did outsource to Latin America. So we've been quite busy. And what you see from interviewing all these companies that participate, because we organize matchmaking meetings, is that they collaborate. And many of the deals that are being done together as they associate with each other. And so we have to give more incentives for that. There's not enough stimuli for that. Korofo and Chile, they do a very good job, the development institution, Bank of Chile, for this, with specific incentives, direct assistance for associative ventures in order to export, to share the costs of marketing expertise in a certain market. I think we have to think about that, empowering the entrepreneurs and empowering them collaboration amongst themselves. I love the idea of Uber for shipping containers. That's a phenomenal idea. We have some time for a few questions. Does anyone have any questions or comments? We'll take the lady down there and then answer you. Please, oh, if you could please identify yourself. Sure. I'm Erin Endine with Karana Corporation. I've worked with Kati before and thank you for inviting me. I thought it was a fantastic presentation and really interesting research. I look forward to looking at the paper in greater depth. Just by way of background, I've been managing USAID trade capacity building projects for about 15 years or so. And so it's through that lens that I'm hearing this and I'm really finding it very exciting. And so I think it's a huge opportunity for developing countries and especially for small and medium enterprises. And I agree with Fabrizio's comments that it could very well be sort of turning on its head, all preconceived notions about SMEs and how large their contribution can be. I also appreciated the fact that we're not talking about exports of goods or trade in goods only. We're also talking about trade in services and Fabrizio. I heard your example about the Uruguayan firm. Also agree, it's a huge opportunity for public-private partnership and that's what development is about right now and probably for the indefinite foreseeable future. So I had actually what comment and a couple of questions, if you don't mind. So I think the donors in general are gonna be embracing this paper and these ideas very enthusiastically. And I wondered if if you've actually, one of my questions is have you had some initial conversations at the OECD and the WTO and donors and how are they reacting to this notion? Because I really do think it could be a game changer for the way that trade capacity building is done in the future. And so that's one question and kind of a relation, a related one is I'm wondering if the doing business indicators might conceivably be tweaked to include indicators of e-commerce readiness. I would think that'd be kind of interesting. And then another question I had was just looking at the chart that you have the World Economic Forum chart which is the scatter plot. I thought that was really fascinating and to think about how donors fit in. Many of the donors do tend to focus, not necessarily AID, but a lot of the regional development banks and multilateral development banks tend to focus on infrastructure. And I worry about funding going, that essentially pushes countries from, from bottom to top but without advancing in their economic impact. And we'd like to rather think about how we can either move them diagonally or just looking at examples. For example, the SUTU and Laos, they have basically the same level of ICT infrastructure but the impacts are much greater for Laos than the SUTU and why is that? How can we, without spending a lot of money on infrastructure, how can we move horizontally? So, and then my only comment would be just, I wanna make sure that although we talk about the power of exports that capacity building relating to e-trade is sort of neutral on the import and export side. And so yeah, just, that's just my comment. Thank you, wonderful question. Sir, we'll have you give you the last question and then we'll let our panelists respond.  I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant. What is being done to get the meetings together over the internet to fund some of this effort and get agreement on it? Katya, I think we'll just go down the line and we have about five more minutes. Erin, thank you and thanks for coming and thanks for all the work we've done together. It's been great, we actually work together on a for trade related issue. So, a lot of the insight comes from that. You know, we haven't had any, this is kind of the release of the paper. We haven't had any formal conversations yet. We've had a working group here as a paving the way for this paper. And we did have partners from the World Bank who have kept IDB abreast, Fabrizio and his colleagues. And I'm actually presenting this at the World Bank tomorrow. There is a round table for the global trade practice. So, hopefully something will come out of that. And certainly, you know, USAID very much would welcome collaboration. We're hoping they could join us. A lot of people just traveling. The same with World Bank. A lot of people are stuck in meetings today but they've been very enthused at this point at least. If I just talk from my personal perspective, tying some of the indicators to doing business. It's a good idea. I think that's a good platform for doing some of it. Another platform is enterprise surveys, which are the firm level surveys. And as I look at them, and Josh, you may also have comments on this, but as I look at the landscape of data in this area, there's a lot of gaps in data, but particularly there are gaps in the firm level, understanding at the firm level, the ICT usage, e-commerce usage, and at the transaction level. So of course, the transaction data is, there is some in with eBay and we're looking to perhaps expand some of the work with them in that direction. And yeah, infrastructure has been a big one for aid for trade, certainly. And maybe, you know, this idea here is that, yeah, we need infrastructure and ICT as well, but the key is really some of these, you know, we can leapfrog maybe some of the infrastructure hurdles. Technology is advancing and we can probably do more with less in the future, but the key is really this e-training, e-learning these aspects that Fabrizio has highlighted that really have been useful or also for Latin American companies. It just sounds so very simple that, hey, I'm gonna put my product out there in the cyberspace and all of a sudden it gets sold globally. Well, certainly you can get discovered, but as competition intensifies, as more and more companies around the world get online and start selling their products, it's even harder to stand out. So how do you do that? You have to be very strategic, you have to understand advertisement online, marketing, social media, using social media to push your product, label products, price products, all of these things. It's a very complex endeavor, not unlike exporting per se. It's just easier for you to get discovered. So I think there's a lot of kind of capacity building at the ground level and certainly with the export promotion agencies play a key role as Josh highlighted. So I'll leave it at that. And definitely on the import side, something, this was very pro-export kind of presentation, but as we look at the import side, e-commerce has also enabled companies to access inputs at much lower prices, much more efficient inputs at world prices because it also gives them the visibility of sellers and platforms like Alibaba are very powerful for this. So there's probably going to be much more on the import side as well. Well, it's very striking to me that a country like China is in between these two bubbles. Right? Why isn't China way up into the right given the size of their economy and the fact that they're the largest trader of ICT in the world, both on the import and export side. And to me, it's because of some of the rigidity in terms of how technology can be used in China and what types of technologies can be used in China. And is the technology being placed in its most productive use, right? So while we see that there is a lot of technology and a lot of infrastructure in China, it's not necessarily deployed in the most efficient way to cause the greatest economic impact. And so I think they're absolutely, you don't just throw technology at countries and say, okay, great, go for it. It's really talking about how do you transform your entire economy by infusing technology throughout your economy into your businesses. So we focus a lot on the individual and connecting the individual and that's great. But that's one of the reasons that I talked about sort of the machine to machine types of transactions, the people to machine types of transactions and the people to people transactions because that's really where the productivity lies is in connecting those high value types of connections. Yeah, just to compliment on that briefly. We talk about the hardware and the software of economic integration. So you have the best roads, but if you reach the country and the lines for the trucks are 48 hours, it's not good to have the best roads. You need the software, the processes online, in place so as to facilitate trade. And the same holds for broadband and ICT. You can have the best infrastructure, but if the people are not literate in the use of internet and there is not enough incentives and information out there, then it can be a bad thing. And so you cannot ignore, it's really multi-dimensional. You were saying Jennifer, the way you deploy it in terms of the infrastructure, but then in terms of the know how the process is and the information needed in order to use that broadband to export. Right, well, for a non-trade expert, I found this conversation really fascinating, interesting. I think it's, for me, it's opening my eyes into an area, just needs continued exploration, great examples, great public-private partnerships, and great new ideas, Kati, with your working paper. Thank you all for joining us. We're gonna have another paper that will be coming out with early 2015 that looks at the security for trade and it's all that facilitation, but again, down to that, trying the power of that entrepreneur and that micro-multi-national. But please join me in thanking our panelists for a terrific discussion.