UN Global Digital Compact – A vehicle for Democracy or Authoritarianism?

At the 75th anniversary of the UN in 2020, member states pledged to improve digital cooperation and shape a digital future in which the full potential for beneficial technology usage could unfold. Building on this, the Secretary-General, in his 2021 report Our Common Agenda, proposed that a Global Digital Compact be developed to outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.

The GDC is the latest step in a lengthy policy journey to have, at least, a shared understanding of key digital principles globally and, at best, common guidelines for the development of our digital future. The idea of a GDC has additional roots in the 2019 Age of Digital Interdependence report, published by the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, and the 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation issued by the UN Secretary-General. Additional fine-tuning of this initiative is provided by the UN SG Policy Brief 5: A Global Digital Compact – an Open, Free and Secure Digital Future for All.

The GDC (see Second RevisionPDF of 26 June 2024) aims to address critical areas of concern such as the digital divide and inclusion in the digital economy, the governance of data, the application of human rights online, the governance of AI, and strategies for promoting trust and safety, including implementing accountability criteria for misleading content.

On 1 July 2024 a group of technical experts involved in the development and maintenance of the Internet and the Web published an open letter calling on the UN Secretary-General and the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology to uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century as part of the upcoming GDC.

The crucial parts of the letter: "The Internet is an unusual technology because it is fundamentally distributed. It is built up from all of the participating networks. Each network participates for its own reasons according to its own needs and priorities. And this means, necessarily, that there is no center of control on the Internet. This feature is an essential property of the Internet, and not an accident. Yet over the past few years we have noticed a willingness to address issues on the Internet and Web by attempting to insert a hierarchical model of governance over technical matters. Such proposals concern us because they represent an erosion of the basic architecture. In particular, some proposals for the GDC can be read to mandate more centralized governance. If the final document contains such language, we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and the Web, but also to the world’s economies and societies. (…) Beyond some high-level consultations, non-government stakeholders (including Internet technical standards bodies and the broader technical community) have had only weak ways to participate in the GDC process. We are concerned that the document will be largely a creation only of governments, disconnected from the Internet and the Web as people all over the world currently experience them. Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and the Tech Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain consistent with the enormously successful multistakeholder Internet governance practice that has brought us the Internet of today."

The GDC has emerged as a key process in negotiating the future of technology and the improvement in digital cooperation among countries. It not only holds the potential to craft a brighter, more equal, accountable, and democratic digital future, but it also runs the risk of streamlining authoritarian beliefs on how the digital space should be governed. Invasive and invisible surveillance tools for national security, internet fragmentation, disinformation, online gender-based violence, and barriers to online freedom of expression are crucial elements to be discussed among member states, the private sector, civil society, and other stakeholders for a meaningful resulting document to be produced.

Many parts of the GDC as the specification of general objectives and the building of new institutions will happen in the future. Therefore, the design of the follow-up- and review-process will be key for its success and effectiveness.