Introduction

Policymakers around the world are grappling with daunting challenges for securing data (digital information) and addressing a host of issues raised by cross-border data flows. Addressing these issues at the global level is made harder by the fact that there is tremendous debate and uncertainty over the way in which governments should interact with the private sector, other governments, and international institutions and forums in discussing how to piece together their data policies, standards, and laws in order to form a framework for data governance.

The rules for how governments and companies collect data, use it to generate insights (i.e., value), and then store and protect it matter across all sectors of the economy. Manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and other industries are increasingly becoming “data-centric” in that they rely on vast quantities of digital information to conduct business. Data sent across global internet and telecommunications networks enables products and services from email and customer management software to cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and 3D printing. Data presents many opportunities, from increased economic growth to improved medicine to better public safety, but it also presents many risks around data misuse and abuse, such as with data privacy violations, algorithmic unfairness, and mass surveillance.

Data presents many opportunities, from increased economic growth to improved medicine to better public safety, but it also presents many risks around data misuse and abuse, such as with data privacy violations, algorithmic unfairness, and mass surveillance.

To begin to address this set of questions around data governance, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched the “Osaka Track” at the G20 summit in June. The objective of the initiative is to create a framework to promote cross-border data flows with enhanced protections and safeguards. Twenty-four countries, including China and the United States, signed a statement affirming the concept of free data flows. India was among those countries who did not.

The most challenging part of the Osaka initiative lies ahead. For the initiative to have any meaning at all—as the global data landscape becomes more fraught and fragmented over time—there needs to be substantive discussion of the hard issues.¹

The Howard Baker Forum and New America convened an expert roundtable in Washington, D.C. on October 3 with the aim of charting a path forward in global data governance. This report aims to capture the main takeaways from that discussion by setting out the debates that underpin the key issues. While the outcome of these debates is not yet clear, the goal of the report is to identify the factors that would need to be addressed in a global data governance framework. It is a starting point meant to guide future discussions. Because the discussion operated under Chatham House Rule, we are the only participants identified in this paper, though the attendees were a diverse group of experts spanning government, private industry, think tanks, and academia. We draw on their expertise at the roundtable discussion in this report.

The first section of this report lays a conceptual foundation by defining what we mean by the terms “data” and “data governance.” Often, misunderstandings about terminology can lead to experts talking past one another and to the creation of obstacles from the start. The second section then defines what we call the different “levers” that make up data governance regimes (e.g., trade agreements, laws, standards, technical tools, etc.) at the super-national, national, and sub-national levels.

The following three sections each focus on key issues that emerged from the discussion:

1. Should a global data governance regime start from the basis that free data flows are (a) inherently beneficial and (b) inevitable?
2. What is the proper relationship between the different levers of data governance?
3. In designing a coalition of countries for whom a set of data flow rules apply, how big should the coalition be, and which countries should belong to it?

Finally, we conclude with a discussion of what research questions need to be addressed in order to move forward in creating an international framework in line with Prime Minister Abe’s vision.