[smartobjectdir] report on the EC IOT expert group meeting, September 29-30

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

The EC group on Internet of Things is a selection of 50 experts or stakeholders in the machine to machine communication space. The charter of the group is to understand this emerging business and technology, and to help EU form policies and research directions so that it can best grow European business, accelerate creation of new services, ensure citizen's  rights are protected, etc. I participate in the group as the IETF's representative, alternating with Zach Selby.

Over the last year, the group has gotten various presentations on ongoing industry and standard activities, problems, consumer views, and so on. The group has now split into six different subgroups on:

- architecture
- standards
- identity
- privacy
- governance
- ethics

I am participating in the three first ones. The groups have been given  "questions" from the EC management that we have answered. Sometimes these questions have been a little bit leading or showing bias; we've attempted to provide education and some guidance for sensible technical directions. For instance, vertical applications where everyone builds all parts are not good, competition in some parts is good, opening interfaces is good, open standards are good, etc.

The commercial players and entities representing industry are generally working together in the expert group. But is also interesting to participate with many people who look at things from very different directions, e.g., it is clear that RFID folks look at things very differently from Zigbee/IP/cellular folks. And consumer rights people, industry, and governance lawyers have different views, too :-) From my own perspective, it would be good to (a) minimize government involvement except for important citizens rights issues such as privacy (b) educate the commission that there is already a lot of business happening with existing technology (c) that Internet-based machine to machine networking is a good and desirable direction and (d) new governance structures for this space should be limited or non-existent.

For an example of a work that one of the subgroups has produced, I include the architecture group's deliverable.

Jari