Introduction

As we enter the age of AI, the digital future appears uncertain. Even before the advent of large language models, digital technologies were straining and fracturing economic, political, and social systems. From Myanmar to the United States, algorithmically boosted hate and disinformation fuel polarization and political violence. Digital state surveillance violates human rights, while corporate surveillance deprives citizens of value and dignity and drives addictive social media platforms that many think are precipitating a mental health crisis among teenagers and young adults.¹ Cybercrime causes billions of dollars in losses to governments and companies and threatens critical infrastructure. The open, global internet is in peril, as governments more frequently shut down access and seek to steer cyber norms toward authoritarian frameworks. Control of data, network infrastructure, semiconductors, and governance of the internet itself is at the heart of escalating geopolitical competition, particularly between the U.S. and China.

It will take governance systems to mitigate the risks and harms of the digital revolution. Yet so far, global digital governance is incoherent and patchwork—fractured along technical, national, geographic, and sectoral lines. Countries impose domestic regulations, but cyberspace is transnational, and digital technologies proliferate at astonishing speed. These technologies challenge the centuries-old notion of sovereignty as distinctly territory-bound, a consensus that has underpinned the international order for centuries. The sovereignty of nation-states still depends on control over physical terrain, but in the theoretically borderless landscape of cyberspace, sovereignty is unbound from conventional geography.

Geopolitical competition, divergent national visions of digital sovereignty and governance, and the power of the private sector mean nation-states struggle to agree on norms to sustain an equitable, safe, and innovative digital domain. The consequential, and in some cases widening, divides between developing and wealthy nations over priorities, impacts, perspectives, and resources illustrate the need not so much for consensus as for justice. Effective global digital governance will depend not on imposing conformity or aligning ideologies, but on developing frameworks and institutions that can rectify power imbalances, as well as make space for areas of agreement and cooperation.

“Effective global digital governance will depend not on imposing conformity or aligning ideologies, but on developing frameworks and institutions that can rectify power imbalances, as well as make space for areas of agreement and cooperation.”

The scale and complexity of the digital domain makes global governance all the more difficult. Consider, for example, the current dynamics of global cooperation and competition in each of the internet’s four layers. The physical layer features intensifying competition between the U.S. and China to control network architecture and infrastructure, such as subsea cables and semiconductors.² The logic layer, the “central nervous system of cyberspace,” functions coherently under the supervision of multi-stakeholder bodies like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), but autocratic countries are trying to bring this layer under greater state control, which threatens to splinter the global internet.³ The platform or application layer is highly fragmented, with different nations adopting different regulatory frameworks and Silicon Valley corporations in the United States wielding more governance power than all but a handful of nations. The machine layer, where powerful AI systems are emerging, is the focus of many regulatory proposals, yet risks defaulting to the same shambolic governance dynamics of the platform layer.

With these challenges and issues in mind, New America’s Planetary Politics initiative spent six months examining fault lines in the digital domain and the gaps and prospects for global digital governance. We started with an examination of digital harm worldwide. There are a variety of reasons to start with harms when thinking about the governance of an emerging technology. For one, it is generally easier to find agreement around the question of what is harmful rather than the question of what is good, as humans are wired to be risk-averse, overweighting the impact of potential negative outcomes relative to potential gains.⁴ The legal and ethical codes of societies tend to focus on deterring what is bad rather than encouraging what is good.

We focused on five issue areas that are generating risk and harm for societies everywhere:

1. AI and algorithms;
2. Digital access and divides;
3. Data protection and data sovereignty;
4. Digital identity and digital surveillance; and
5. Transnational cybercrime.

We conducted a literature review to understand the tensions and areas of contestation in the academic, policy, and public debates surrounding these issues. Then, to deepen and broaden the inquiry, we convened groups of experts and practitioners. The first forum was a workshop featuring scholars and civil society leaders who either study, manage, or are otherwise involved in initiatives that attempt to exercise democratic governance over aspects of the digital domain (e.g., the Facebook Oversight Board, the Global Network Initiative, the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership). A series of virtual consultations followed, including one with former leaders of ICANN, the multi-stakeholder body that manages the Domain Name System (DNS), the phonebook of the indexed internet.

The culmination of this effort was the establishment of the 30-member Digital Futures Task Force, the first step on a multiyear process that New America has undertaken to shape the public debate on preventing, mitigating, and managing digital harms. The task force consists of five working groups, one for each issue area. Each working group had six members, each either hailing from or focused in their work on a different region: Africa, Latin America, North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We anticipate that membership will continue to grow as we take aim at making the debate about the digital future more inclusive and equitable.

The geographical range aimed to bring developing and wealthy nations’ perspectives in equal weight. Task force members include distinguished scholars and researchers, diplomats, law enforcement officials, technologists, entrepreneurs, and lawyers. The essential selection criteria was diversity—of nationality, identity, expertise, and experience. In May, the task force convened for a two-day symposium in Washington, DC, in which the working groups mapped harms and areas of contestation in their issue area and began pointing the way to principles and frameworks for governance.

We had three questions to answer.

First, we sought to identify some of the global fault lines that are shaping the digital future: Where and how do scholars, policymakers, cultures, sectors, and socioeconomic groups diverge in their experience and perception of digital harm and risks? Second, we wanted to map the existing global digital governance landscape: Which nations, companies, multilateral organizations, and multi-stakeholder bodies are shaping the digital domain, and how? Lastly, we wanted to identify potential solutions: What new governing frameworks and institutional models could bring greater security, equity, and prosperity to the digital future?