4. Looking Ahead: The Future of Internet Governance
The nature of discussion on internet governance has shifted over the years. ICANN is no longer central to internet governance conversations, and future issues may not involve ICANN. Diverse players are involved in internet governance relating to cybersecurity, IoT, AI, big data, search markets, social media, mobile operators and human rights. The landscape is more complex and more structurally difficult. There is no single venue in which to explore issues relating to internet governance writ large.83
China with its ambitions to become a technological superpower has been active within the UN more broadly84 and the ITU specifically to shape technical standards, which would support its authoritarian vision for internet governance. An example of this is the Chinese-led work related to IMT-2020 (International Mobile Telecommunications 2020), the ITU’s version of 5G technology, such as machine learning and edge computing. Russia is also using the ITU to advance its own technological vision, a prime example being the Digital Object Architecture (DOA) that could support Russia’s ‘sovereign internet’ aims and, if adopted, could destroy the internet as we know it.85 More recently, a group of countries tried unsuccessfully to pass a resolution at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 in Dubai to task an intergovernmental institution to start developing policy and regulatory guidelines for AI. The same week in New York, the UN First Committee put forward two conflicting resolutions on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, one was the Open Ended Working Group proposed by Russia the other was proposed by the US and like-minded countries to reinstate the GGE; both are going ahead. These developments are a warning sign that a multi-stakeholder future for internet governance is not inevitable.
If EU and US governments do not start coordinating with a positive, multi-stakeholder vision and effective processes for future internet governance challenges, the governance of future communications technologies could drift towards authoritarian regimes, such as China, or an unaccountable private sector. Neither would be a good outcome. EU–US coordination can take place at the national or regional levels, or in groups of like-minded countries.
83 Interviewee #2, November 2019.
84 Okano-Heijmans, M. and van der Putten, F-P. (2018), ‘A United Nations with Chinese characteristics?’, Clingendael, https://www.clingendael.org/sites/default/files/2018-12/China_in_the_UN_1.pdf (accessed 4 Oct. 2019).
85 For a critique of DOA, see Internet Society (2016), ‘Overview of the Digital Object Architecture (DOA)’, https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2016/overview-of-the-digital-object-architecture-doa/.