In a few days (June 15-16, in Rome) Apro18 will kick off, the event in which Assoprovider will meet with businesses and citizens to discuss the new challenges in telecommunications, with topics such as distorted competitiveness, GDPR, and blockchain.

To learn more about the event, we met Dino Bortolotto, the president of Assoprovider. Here is what he told us about Apro18.

What are the opportunities of Apro18, why be there?

"Participate at Apro18 mainly means discovering that there is an association that has been fighting for years to find new ways, fairer, to manage public resources. In recent years, Assoprovider has already demonstrated that by involving different entities, businesses, associations, and institutions, significant results can be achieved. Our victories over the years, since we obtained the recognition of ISPs as telecommunications operators in April 2002, have been and continue to be crucial for reducing the digital divide in our country and for fair competitiveness in telecommunications.».

Among the topics to be discussed at Apro18 is precisely that of artificially boosted competitiveness…

This is the starting point of all Assoprovider's activities over the years. In the telecommunications sector, there is a need for a new way of doing business and a new management approach by the legislator. The economic competitiveness of the country must be effective and based on objective data and should not be precluded to anyone at a regulatory level. Article 3 of the Constitution explains that it is it is the duty of the State to remove entry barriers that prevent “the full participation of workers in the economic organization of the Country". This does not happen in practice."

Among the topics addressed is the GDPR: once again, there is controversy among small telecom operators.

"Many regulations in telecommunications do not take into account a complex scenario made up of entrepreneurial realities with different characteristics. It is one thing for an operator to serve a thousand users, another to serve a million. Even on the GDPR issue, the legislator seems to have forgotten that among telecommunications operators, there are very large and very small ones, and the same rules cannot apply to everyone, such as that of the DPO. This is one of the keys with which we will address the GDPR and to do so synergistically, we have invited representatives from Confcommercio as well as Confartigianato."

Blockchain will also be discussed. Why are telecom operators sensitive to the topic?

"The possibility of using distributed ledgers that constitute the nature of blockchain it is a topic that an operator cannot ignore. We will discuss this and how the very structure of the blockchain, considered by everyone as the future of the Internet, is today in contrast with the GDPR regulation. The regulation indeed states that personal data, at the discretion of the subject, must be deleted. On the blockchain, on the contrary, data cannot be removed once they are entered into the chain's blocks.

Apro18 will also be an opportunity to discuss the upcoming challenges for Assoprovider. What is the most important one?

We have already been working for some time on a knot of entrepreneurial democracy that needs to be untied as soon as possible: the use of frequency space, a collective asset that today is mainly in the hands of oligopolies. They are the ones who decide which frequencies to use and how much to pay for them, outside of any real competition. Moreover, we are the country where licensed point-to-point frequencies are the most expensive, at least 10 times more than in Europe. Ensuring accessibility to frequencies for everyone is a battle that will see the association engaged in the coming years»