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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

Organizations across industries are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to support their innovation processes, supply chains, marketing and sales and other business functions. Implementing AI, firms report efficiency gains from automation and enhanced decision-making thanks to more relevant, accurate and timely predictions. By exposing the benefits of digitizing everything, COVID-19 has only accelerated these processes. Recognizing the growing importance of AI and its pervasive impact, this chapter defines the “social value of AI” as the combined value derived from AI adoption by multiple stakeholders of an organization. To this end, we discuss the benefits and costs of AI for a business-to-business (B2B) firm and its internal, external and societal stakeholders. Being mindful of legal and ethical concerns, we expect the social value of AI to increase over time as the barriers for adoption go down, technology costs decrease, and more stakeholders capture the value from AI. We identify the contributions to the social value of AI, by highlighting the benefits of AI for different actors in the organization, business consumers, supply chain partners and society at large. This chapter also offers future research opportunities, as well as practical implications of the AI adoption by a variety of stakeholders.