GSR-25 guidelines – and the conversations driving regulatory action

By Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau, ITU, and Mansour AlQurashi, Acting Deputy Governor for International Affairs and Partnerships, Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) has just celebrated a historic milestone – 25 years as the world’s premier gathering for the telecommunication regulatory community. Since its inception, GSR has stood out as a driving force behind global digital policy.

Regulation is essential to ensure that telecommunication networks and services operate fairly, efficiently, and securely, serving the interests of both consumers and providers.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organizes this key annual meeting to help regulators and nations navigate the rapidly evolving technology landscape. The latest in the series, GSR-25, took place in Riyadh, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, between 31 August and 3 September, co-hosted by the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST).

Our GSR-25 theme – “Regulation for Sustainable Digital Development” – outlined our principle challenge.

We must do more than keep pace with present technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).

Regulation is not simply about oversight – the frameworks we design today also need to shape a sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous digital future for all.

A blueprint for action

The GSR Best Practice Guidelines, introduced in 2003, have become more than just annual policy documents. Year after year, regulators come together to define effective policy and regulatory measures and guiding principles that keep our digital world competitive, secure, and open to everyone.

Successive editions serve as a chronicle of our digital age. From building the market in the early 2000s to building the networks in the mid-2000s and addressing the rise of the digital ecosystem in the mid-2010s.

Today, we stand at a new regulatory frontier, one where AI governance, the new space economy and sustainable digital transformation are front-and-centre.

The newly published GSR-25 Best Practice Guidelines provide a practical roadmap for each country to navigate this transformation, empowering regulators to become digital ecosystem builders.

With a focus on building regulatory innovation for a digital and green ecosystem, this latest edition provides tools and frameworks that can reach across regions and economies, aiming to build a bridge to the future.

Forward-looking regulation

The GSR-25 Best Practice Guidelines are built on four key pillars:

• Fostering innovation – This calls on regulators to move beyond traditional oversight and actively embed innovation into their core practices. It means institutionalizing experimentation through tools like regulatory sandboxes and testbeds, creating agile policy frameworks that can adapt to new technologies, and learning from failure to build more resilient regulatory models.
• Adapting capacity – As digital realities evolve, so must the institutions that govern them. This pillar focuses on updating regulatory mandates to address new challenges and investing in the upskilling and reskilling of regulatory staff. It also involves redesigning institutional structures to break down silos and enable a ‘whole-of-government’ approach to digital policy.
• Leveraging technology – To regulate the digital world, we must embrace its tools. This involves the strategic use of regulatory technology and supervisory technology to become more data-driven, efficient and transparent. By leveraging artificial intelligence and big data analytics, regulators can monitor markets more effectively and make faster, evidence-based decisions.
• Strengthening cooperation – Digital challenges don’t stop at borders. This pillar emphasizes the need to make cross-border and cross-sector cooperation a core function of every regulator’s work. We all need shared learning infrastructure, harmonized regional approaches, and, at the broad regional level, a collective voice on the global stage to tackle shared challenges together.

Committed to a sustainable future

GSR-25 brought together regulatory voices from around the world.

And a clear message emerged: Together, as a global community, we are deeply committed to sustainable development.

The future of digital regulation is proactive and collaborative.

For the next 25 years and beyond, regulators will not just respond to change – they will help build the digital societies and economies that shape our shared future.

Explore the GSR-25 Best Practice Guidelines

Sustainable digital regulation will also be on the table at at ITU’s World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC-25), coming up in Baku, Azerbaijan, between 17 and 28 November.

Read the press release

Header image credit: ITU