Editor’s note: John Strand is head of London-based Strand Consult, a global telecommunications and internet consulting firm.

BARCELONA, Spain – Each year Strand Consult previews the Mobile World Congress. MWC 2018 will likely attract even more people than last year, but it is no longer the event that defines the industry.  That award goes to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas which attracted 184,000 attendees and 3900 exhibitors last month and demonstrates how mobile technologies have become ubiquitous and integrated. MWC has lost its edge and has become the politically correct event.

Last year I observed, MWC has been clinically cleansed of bad news and negative stories of the many political, economic, and regulatory challenges mobile operators face every day around the world – challenges that have a detrimental impact on operators’ finances and their ability to invest in the infrastructure on which society depends.

MWC’s 83 paged brochure features eight elements: Innovation, Content & Media, The Network, Applied AI, Future Service Providers, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Digital Consumer, and Tech In Society. There is little to no focus on the growing regulatory challenges for telecom operators around the world which negatively impact investment and innovation. The word “regulation” appears just five times in the whole brochure in connection with three presentations. “Roaming” is mentioned 4 times with 2 presentations; “GDPR” four times with two presentations; and “net neutrality” once with one presentation. Effectively conference organizers have opted out of the opportunity to use the event as a burning platform for addressing the industry’s greatest challenges. GSMA’s lack of results to optimize regulation demonstrates how this important area has been deprioritized. One need only look at the grotesque situation of overregulation with net neutrality in the EU and the $200 billion gap in investment.

The Program: It’s easier to copy than create your own vision

MWC would be the perfect place for the industry to present its unique and compelling agenda to address the key regulatory challenges. The telecom industry has global scale, size and significance, and should set its own meaningful goals and objectives. But unfortunately it chooses to parrot the 17 goals of the United Nations, “Bringing the Sustainable Development Goals to life”, a three year old message from a government organization.

The reality of governments in 2018 is that they exert increasing control of telecom infrastructure to monitor citizens, political opponents, and enemies. Companies such as Vodafone, Telenor, Telefonica, Verizon and others have been fighting back through transparency reports to show consumers and citizens just how much governments want to surveille. If GSMA had a backbone, they would promote these companies and their efforts to defend people and their rights, rights which are enabled and furthered by the creation of infrastructure.

Among the 17 UN goals, GSMA has decided to play the female gender card and create Women4Tech, programming around women and the industry. Events include the Women4Tech Summit, Women4Tech GLOMO Awards Presentation, Women4Tech Keynote with a focus on “Women Empowering Technology”; gender equality and career development; “Women Encouraging Technology”, mentoring and youth education; “Women Transforming Technology”; women in communication and vertical sectors; and “Women Innovating in Technology”. The stated goal of Women4Tech is to create more gender diversity in ecosystem in the mobile and tech industry.

Strand Consult has long promoted the need for more women at top levels in the industry. But GSMA does not practice what it preaches:  women are a small minority of the top management of GSMA itself. GSMA´s board has 22 men and just 3 women. GSMA´s management team consists of 7 men and 2 women. Among MWC’s 108,000 attendees in 2017, less than a quarter are women. This is disappointing particularly when two-thirds of the event’s attendees are from Europe, a region that has had focus on gender equality for a long time. GSMA’s efforts amount to virtue signaling, the conspicuous expression of moral standing.

Gender equality?

These figures also reflect poorly on GSMA’s CEO, the Swedish Mats Granryd, whose country is a leader in gender equality. The Swedes would not tolerate a company like GSMA that had just 12% of its board members being women. In 2016 in Sweden, 32% of board members of listed companies were women.  Granryd’s results for his 2½ years at the helm of GSMA are as lackluster as those for his last job as CEO of Tele2 in Sweden. While Granryd will feature himself as a speaker in the Women4Tech, there are just three women among the nine speakers.

Women fighting for gender equality will likely recognize that getting effective women in top positions requires more than GSMA’s window dressing.

MWC features many of the keynote speakers you’ve heard before, speakers that can be described as ”safe choices.” Moreover the speakers are overwhelmingly male, just 9 out of 37 keynote speakers are women.

More than 100.000 people will probably have a great week in Barcelona. Let the show begin.

(C) Strand Consult