Welcome to the fifth edition of NetMission news and policy digest, where we transform some tech news and policy updates of the month into a bite-size reader for you. In this article, we dig into three of the most important digital governance developments of 2023.
A rough but wide political agreement on artificial intelligence
Last year started only two months after the release of ChatGPT. The chatbot created a boom in artificial intelligence development that no one envisioned. It left obsolete most initiatives created to regulate AI, including early versions of the European AI Act and the OECD guidelines. However, the global political thrust can set 2024 as the year where common ground areas are solidified in AI governance.
Although throughout 2023 leading countries and organizations, including the UN, the OECD, the United States, the European Union, and China, released different approaches to AI, the UK AI Safety Summit must be celebrated as the first rough international consensus on the set of norms that should rule over this technology. Indeed, the Bletchley Declaration touches on key areas including protecting human rights, transparency and explainability, fairness, accountability, regulation, safety, appropriate human oversight, ethics, bias mitigation, and data protection. Signatory countries include China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea and Singapore. Importantly, the US, the UK, and the European Union are also signatories.
There is a long way to a safe and reliable AI ecosystem. However, 2024 can be a pivotal year. Following the political agreement on the European AI Act, there are chances this regulation boosts the level of protection of Europeans who interact with AI. The technical work on the law’s text is set to start right after the holiday season. Importantly, due to the Brussels effect, citizens around the globe may also benefit from positive developments in Europe.
India and Japan stand out in the region, as their strategies can differ quite significantly. While both countries advocate for creating AI ecosystems that promote human rights and ensure transparency in data learning, India has called for a global framework for the ethical use of AI. In turn, to accelerate the development and use of generative AI, Japan’s generative AI guidelines drift away from the leading countries’ strategies and do not consider penalties for noncompliance.
UN: hands off the Internet
In May 2023, the UN Secretary-General (SG), António Guterres, released a policy paper entitled “A Global Digital Compact – An Open, Free and Secure Digital Future For All”. With this brief, the UN tried to address issues such as digital inclusion, internet fragmentation, and trust in the digital space. Through developing principles, objectives, and actions the UN seeks to advance into a more open, secure, and human-centered digital future.
While recognizing that the GDC can support the development and adoption of the Internet internationally, for example, by helping close the digital divide, this initiative has been criticized by different stakeholders as it creates a new model for digital governance where the private sector, the government, and civil society are the only stakeholder groups, excluding the technical community as a distinct voice in internet governance.
Historically, the technical community has been a different group, separated from civil society. Since the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia, the tech community has been widely recognized as one of the many independent stakeholder groups that engage in developing the Internet. The WSIS+10 Outcome Document is even more specific, stating several times that the technical community differs from the civil society and other stakeholders.
Moreover, through the UN-run Digital Cooperation Forum, The GDC could also shift the governance of the Internet from a multistakeholder model to a state-based and state-controlled governance model. Indeed, as it happened once before, sidelining the technical community in UN fora is highly likely a strategy used by authoritarian regimes to impose their version of a censored Internet.
In October, The Internet Governance Forum Leadership Panel and Multistakeholder Advisory Group sent a letter to the UN leadership stating that the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is an ecosystem prepared to absorb the Digital Cooperation Forum and address the need for periodic multistakeholder reviews and follow-up mechanisms to the GDC.
The GDC’s agenda will be agreed upon at the Summit of the Future in September 2024 through a technology track involving all stakeholders: governments, the United Nations system, the private sector (including tech companies), civil society, grass-roots organizations, academia, and individuals, including youth.
Measuring digital development: latest data on the digital divide
In late November, The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released the latest version of its Facts and Figures 2023 report, showing steady but uneven progress in global Internet connectivity, and economic and gender digital divides among wealthy and low-income societies and individuals.
According to early estimates, growth in Internet connectivity remains the strongest in low-income countries, where data indicate that Internet users have increased by about 17% over the past year. However, less than one-third of individuals are connected to the Internet in these countries.
Importantly, although sustained efforts from the Internet community have resulted in the highest number of people connected to the Internet, the ITU highlights that low-income individuals are still being left behind, including 2.6 billion people, or one-third of the global population, who remained offline during 2023.
In the Asia-Pacific region, 66% of individuals used the Internet in 2023, but only 63% of the female population used it last year. Importantly, 81% of the people aged between 14 and 24 were Internet users during last year, almost 20 percentiles higher than the average in the region. Finally, the ITU’s report shows that 75% of individuals in the area owned a mobile phone during 2023, which is only slightly lower than the world’s average.
These numbers should be celebrated and motivating at the same time. The ITU’s report shows many reasons to be optimistic, but much work is still needed. Fulfilling the promise of universal and meaningful connectivity is one of the most important causes of our time, and 2024 is bound to be a year when even more people become Internet users.
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By Vicente Arias González (Reviewed and edited by Jenna Manhau Fung)