Executive Summary
The digital world is in disarray. For all their benefits, digital technologies have unleashed harms ranging from algorithmic bias and disinformation to ransomware attacks. Rising inequality, social and political divisions, and escalating geopolitical tensions have darkened more hopeful visions of our shared digital future. Tech companies, arguably the most powerful private entities in history, are racing to deploy powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will transform societies. At a time when global cooperation is essential, governance is fragmented within the different layers of the digital domain and failing to manage risk and conflict. Never before has the future of the digital revolution felt so uncertain and contested.
By now, the ills of digitization are well-trod research terrain. Yet, there are poorly understood divergences in how different nations, sectors, epistemic communities, and socioeconomic groups perceive, experience, and address digital harm. From January through June 2023, New America’s Planetary Politics initiative undertook a research agenda to understand these fault lines and to identify first-order principles that could move the digital world toward greater safety and equity. To do this, we conducted an extensive literature review, consulted with experts and hosted workshops, and convened a global, multidisciplinary group of researchers, technologists, and policymakers we named the Digital Futures Task Force.
The first part of this analysis was focused on five issue areas in digital technology that are driving conflict, human rights violations, and socioeconomic displacement: (1) AI and algorithmic decision-making, (2) digital access and divides, (3) data protection and data sovereignty, (4) digital identity and surveillance, and (5) transnational cybercrime.
We then mapped the where, why, and how of the ways competition, contestation, and cooperation in those five issue areas are shaping the patchy global digital governance landscape today. What came through right up front was that trend-setting nation-states including the United States, China, European Union, and India have divergent visions for the digital future. Arguably, Russia, too, falls within this category of trendsetters as well but more as a result of its default to adopting policies, customs, and approaches to tech governance that fall in line with China’s vision. Now more than ever, we see the ways clashes between those trend-setting states are spilling into the open in multilateral fora focused on shaping global cyber norms. Large American technology companies are digital sovereigns in their own right, with governing power to rival that of governments. Amid increasing contestation, multi-stakeholder institutions still find consensus among diverse interests to manage the global internet.
From our dialogues, consultations, and analysis, a fundamental conclusion emerged: An over-concentration of power and severe power asymmetries are causing conflict, harm, and governance dysfunction in the digital domain. Whereas the internet began as a distributed enterprise that connected and empowered individuals worldwide, extreme concentrations of political, economic, and social power now characterize the digital domain. Power imbalances are especially acute between developing and wealthy nations, as a handful of rich-world tech companies and nation-states control the terms and trajectory of digitization.
The Digital Futures Task Force identified first principles for positive interventions and explored governing frameworks for countering power asymmetries and steering the world toward a safer, more equitable digital future. At a conceptual level, this will take not a single international agency, but rather a networked, multi-stakeholder ecosystem of institutions, agreements, and initiatives that work as a fluid, shifting, federated whole, like, in the words of one task force member, a school of fish moving individually yet in concert through a changing current.
On a more practical level, a few takeaways and first principles stood out as in need of urgent attention:
- We have a critical opportunity to get ahead of possible harms that will stem from AI; science and citizen-centric fora like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and Technology offer a model means of refocusing the digital governance ecosystem beyond the myopic logic of national sovereignty.
- Amid digital divides and increasing government control over the internet, multilateral and multi-stakeholder agencies should invest in fail-safes, alternative or redundant means of access, that can shift the stewardship of connectivity away from concentrated power centers.
- Regional standards that respect diverse local circumstances can help generate global cooperation on challenges such as cybercrime.
- To reduce global conflict in digital surveillance, democracies should practice what they preach and ban commercial spyware outright.
- Redistributing the value from big data can diminish corporate power and empower individuals.
From a research perspective, more work is needed to understand and draw attention to the ways digital power asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds are shaping opportunity, risk, and sovereignty. In the next year, we plan to reconvene an expanded Digital Futures Task Force to conduct further analysis in two areas: (1) AI governance and impacts in the developing world and (2) the battles over digital sovereignty playing out in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
We intend this report and the next phase of work as a modest contribution to the effort to bring about principled stewardship of the digital domain. We believe more global engagement and attention to power imbalances are essential to address the widening gaps among nations and resolve conflicts between corporations, governments, and citizens over the contours of sovereignty in the digital domain.