The Escalating Fight Over Our Digital Future

The clock is ticking on the next big battle over the future of digital governance. In just a few months, tech giants like Twitter, TikTok, and Meta could be facing tens of millions of dollars in fines and a whole new series of legal battles now that the European Union’s Digital Services Act has come into force. Together with its companion law, the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s regulations represent the most significant challenge to date to the power and impunity of Big Tech — with the potential to shift the terms of not just the European but the global digital economy.

But the regulation of online platforms isn’t the only thing up for grabs. The digital domain — in all its many layers and dimensions — has fast emerged as a new site of global competition and conflict. From artificial intelligence to IP network exchanges, digital tools are redefining the way we think about geopolitical power and the very idea of sovereignty itself. That’s a problem for diplomacy and global stability. Traditional standard-setting venues like the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) are struggling to keep up.

The benefits of digitization have been immense — but so have the harms. Rampant disinformation, privacy violations, cyberattacks, and the worsening of inequalities are only a few of the problems we face. As abuses proliferate and the technology rapidly broaches new frontiers of complexity, power, and reach, tensions over security, access, innovation, and human rights are becoming more pronounced, and the stakes are rising.

Digital technologies are transforming the geopolitics of power and disrupting international security arrangements that emerged out of WWII three generations ago. Telecommunications providers who build and maintain the world’s digital architecture — fiber optic cables, satellites, 5G networks — compete with one another and entangle themselves in geopolitical contests. National governments are pursuing competitive industrial policies and fighting pitched battles with global rivals to capture leadership roles at international standard-setting institutions.

Nation-states have advanced divergent visions for how to govern the digital domain and whose interests should take precedence. The big three trend-setters today are China, the United States, and the European Union. China prefers a dominant and exclusive role for the state. The U.S. gives preferential treatment to corporations and the logic of market incentives. The EU is driven by conceptions of end-user consumers that may or may not be applicable in a few years’ time. India, Brazil, and others are also beginning to shape the trajectory of global digital governance with the development of open digital public infrastructure. Firms valued in the trillions, meanwhile, are doing their own thing.

In this fractured, poorly governed global arena, tech giants have erected walled gardens and monopolized core functions such as search and social networking. Products designed by companies in California or Shenzhen are exported to global markets with little understanding of or regard for local cultural, political, and socioeconomic dynamics that inform user behaviors. In the name of counterterrorism and information sovereignty, governments create splinternets and shut down internet access with increasing frequency. The trajectory of the digital future — with implications for the political, economic, social, and psychological lives of billions — is being charted behind the closed doors of boardrooms, councils of state, or obscure quasi-governmental fora like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

It’s clear we need a different model of global stewardship to ensure digital technology promotes human rights, inclusive sustainable development, and international stability. But the world has yet to develop global frameworks to govern the digital domain. So what kinds of principles and mechanisms should underwrite global tech governance? Who should write the rules? And how?

To start, we need to set a path to a more people-centered and inclusive digital future. To level the playing field, on everything from access to the internet to privacy protections, we need to build consensus on the guardrails for the governance of digital tech to promote security and development, and to prevent harm. Innovation alone won’t get us there.

That the digital domain is borderless, rapidly changing, and shaped by multiple stakeholders — national governments, international institutions, tech corporations, private sector producers, citizen-consumers, independent developer communities, and countless others — makes it hard to conceptualize governance models that will sustain long into the future. Whatever solutions we come up with, they must be flexible to accommodate a wide array of interests, cultures, politics, and economies, as well as balance the competing imperatives of security, innovation, and human rights.

Global governance that promotes a human-centric digital future should have at least three features. First, governance must meaningfully involve a wide and globally representative range of actors. Digitization touches every sector of society and affects every country in the world. Effectively understanding and governing its impacts requires the input and influence of civil society, academia, and other institutions beyond national governments and large corporations.

Technologists would be core drivers of an evolving dialogue about what constitutes digital harms and what to do about them, along with policymakers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists, and human rights advocates. But beyond those trained or versed in the STEM fields, the conversation should also include ethicists, philosophers, anthropologists, and others from the social sciences and humanities. As digital technology researcher and strategist Nanjira Sambuli points out, pre-existing political, cultural, and socioeconomic dynamics are all intensified by digitization, and so must be addressed by tech governance.

Second, given the complexity and dynamism of the digital domain, we will need to think more creatively about the institutions and arrangements constituting global governance. Beyond esoteric multilateral bureaucracies and comprehensive treaties, we could imagine a fluid, networked ecosystem of bodies, agreements, and ongoing conversations. Such a regime could be built piecemeal, following a strategy of modularity as digital policy specialists Chris Riley and Susan Ness propose for platform governance — an approach by which small or bilateral coalitions of governments work with experts to jointly develop and advance discrete modules, such as agreements, mechanisms, protocols, or rules, with the goal of harmonizing national policies.

And third, whatever the structure of the tech governance system, it ought to be based on principles that reflect the larger public interest. Contrary to an oft-repeated trope, technology is never neutral. "The things we call ‘technologies’ are ways of building order in our world,” wrote political theorist Langdon Winner in a seminal 1980 article. “Consciously or not, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time.”

Several principles matter for a thriving, equitable digital domain, but we might start where the internet began: with openness. The internet became humanity’s largest, most inclusive collective project because a spirit of openness motivated its early creators. Open protocols, standards, and code ensured any device could plug in, any network could connect, and any user could freely participate and contribute. It is still true today that open infrastructure technologies improve access, innovation, and even security, as transparency allows for greater collective scrutiny to spot vulnerabilities.

What’s important for a prosperous, human-centered digital future is that governance is based on principles that ensure technology serves the interests of people — not those of concentrated centers of power. With its new regulations coming into force, the European Union has thrown down a marker in defense of the popular interest. But the war over the digital future is just getting started.