3 Regulation and the Internet of Things Author: Prof. Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom1 3.1 Introduction Plummeting electronics and communication costs have set the stage for a rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). The billions of everyday physical items and appliances that now have sensors and network links will increasingly be able to remotely share data about themselves, their users and their environments. In the next decade, technology companies and consulting firms expect tens of billions of IoT devices to be deployed, with a total annual economic impact in the trillions of US dollars2.Companies manufacturing IoT devices are only one part of a broader ecosystem of organizations developing the IoT. The data created by interconnected devices can be shared via communication networks, stored on application platforms (including social media sites), and controlled by third-party applications. The information is then accessible from users’ smart phones (which themselves contain an increasingly diverse range of sensors)3. This chapter examines the concepts, technologies, and societal changes influenced by the IoT and related technical developments. These include convergence, cloud services, data analytics, the proliferation of sensors, and the measuring and monitoring of people, machines and things. Seen as a whole, this constitutes a shift from human-to-human communications to machine-to-machine (M2M) and everything-to-everything communications. The purpose of the chapter is to raise awareness among the ICT regulatory community of the changes caused by the advent of IoT. It will examine how this huge shift is impacting consumers, businesses, governments and overall society. The most important regulatory implications are in the areas of licensing, spectrum management, standards, competition, security and privacy.3.2 Internet of Things concepts and deployment The ITU-T’s definition of the IoT calls it “a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies4.” This refers to the network of remotely linked tags, sensors and actuators (motors and other mechanisms to cause an action within a device) that are increasingly being built into objects throughout the physical world, driven by an ongoing rapid drop in the cost of microchips, sensors and communication capacity. Collectively (and with slightly different nuances and emphases) these technologies are also termed ubiquitous/pervasive computing, cyber-physical systems, smart environments/spaces/cities (shown in figure 3.2, and discussed in the next section), the industrial Internet (focusing on manufacturing processes), and ambient intelligence. The term Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, meanwhile, is used to refer to communications directly between IoT devices, often via cellular networks. The mobile industry association GSMA predicts between 1 and 2 billion M2M connections by 20205. This has regulatory implications for switching and roaming, as discussed later in the chapter.In addition to the wide range of terminology, the IoT takes in and enables a very broad range of applications. A short list would describe more efficient agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, counterfeit detection, monitoring of people, stock, vehicles, equipment and infrastructure, along with the improved healthcare and traffic management discussed already in this chapter. Moreover, there are applications for retailing, product development and hydrocarbon exploration – and it doesn’t stop there. The IoT also enables new business models, such as car and truck rental Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016 69