On 26 May 2026, in Haikou, I had the opportunity to speak on behalf of ITU in the opening panel of the 47th COPOLCO Plenary, ISO’s policy committee on consumer issues, this year devoted to “Digital Consumer Rights.” I shared the stage with Erin Parsons (Consumers International), Rémi Lang (UNCTAD), Dr Thang Luong (ASEAN Secretariat), Michel Oliveira de Souza (OHCHR), and Laura Lindsay (Chair-Elect, ISO/IEC JTC 1).
The title of my talk, “Standards for Inclusive and Trustworthy Digital Ecosystems,” reflects the angle I wanted to make: digital consumer rights cannot remain policy principles alone. They need to be translated into the technical choices, governance processes, and standards that actually shape digital services.
In practice, every day interactions with the digital world, searching online, comparing prices, accepting terms and conditions, filing a complaint, are increasingly shaped by technical systems: algorithms, data flows, digital identity, recommender systems, AI tools. That is exactly why technical standards matter. They are never neutral. They determine how these systems are designed, deployed, secured, and ultimately trusted.
I tried to explain what “translation” actually means in this context. Transparency becomes requirements on disclosure, labelling, and explainability. Privacy becomes data minimization, access controls, and retention limits. Accessibility becomes requirements ensuring services work for persons with disabilities, older persons, people with low digital literacy, and users in low connectivity environments.
The right to know, understand, and challenge the digital systems that shape our choices.
That is what I called, borrowing a concept gaining traction in current research, the “epistemic rights” of the digital consumer. This is where standards can genuinely help: they provide a shared language and concrete processes to turn consumer protection objectives into operational safeguards.
I also pointed to a real difficulty: consumer protection language, human rights language, and engineering language do not meet naturally. Consumer policy asks who may be harmed, who is vulnerable, what remedy exists. Technical standardization asks what the system should do, how to measure it, what controls are needed. Building a bridge between these two logics is the work ahead, especially because in digital markets harm is rarely visible. No one is forced, but choices can be quietly shaped by opaque systems, profiling, or manipulative design.
I then walked through the three ways ITU contributes to this work: through standards themselves (accessibility, security, data protection, digital identity, AI enabled systems), through capacity building and policy dialogue, including national AI strategies and the Global Symposium for Regulators, and through global cooperation, via ITU-T study groups, the AI Standards Exchange, the AI for Good platform, and joint work with ISO and IEC.
My message to COPOLCO members was simple: consumer protection needs to enter the standards conversation early, at the design stage, not after the technical architecture is already fixed. In practice, that means asking a few consistent questions. Are services accessible to every type of user? Can consumers understand when AI is used and what is being inferred about them? Are privacy and security built in by design? And when something goes wrong, can consumers contest a decision, refuse a use, or obtain redress?
The session fed directly into the next day’s closed workshop, organized around six thematic tables: transparency, fairness, autonomy, privacy, product safety, and access and redress. The discussions confirmed a widely shared conclusion: the principles already exist, the real challenge is implementing them through standards. The plenary session closed with the adoption of COPOLCO Resolution 7/2026, making digital consumer rights a priority workstream for COPOLCO going forward.
This is exactly the kind of moment I find most useful in this line of work: bringing consumer protection authorities, standards bodies, companies, civil society, and human rights experts to the same table, so that the consumer perspective is present upstream, rather than added as an afterthought.